Light, darkness, and expendable children

It has happened again; children slaughtered. This time it was a Taliban attack at a school in Pakistan, but it's an old, old story. It's part of everyone's least favorite Christmas-related story, Herod's killing the children of Bethlehem in an attempt to preserve his power. And terrorists and militias still use such tactics today. It's a time honored way to gain power, or to cling to it.

The powers that be in our world, from the most violent and inhumane to the most benign, are generally willing to sacrifice others to gain or maintain what they desire. The Taliban are an obscene, extreme version of this, but even in our country you can see the pattern at work. Corporations pay wages that no one can live on, and children of unskilled workers are sacrificed into poverty and hopelessness at the altar of greed and profit.

Tuesday's slaughter in Pakistan happened just days after the two-year remembrances of the killings at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. That shooting was the work of a deranged individual and not an attempt to grasp or maintain power and control. Yet our nation seems fully willing to permit such events in order to maintain a so-called right to weapons. Why on earth would we elevate a right to bear arms over the life of children? But of course that old, old story has always seen children as expendable. Even in our culture, where children are so celebrated, we still are more than willing for large numbers of them to languish in poverty, to be abused in poor foster care, or to die in order to preserve "my rights."