I didn’t follow the trial. In truth, I hadn’t even heard the story of Kyle Rittenhouse and the gun he carried and the trigger he pulled until the story was closed in a courtroom with two simple words: “Not guilty.” I only know, therefore, the barest facts: two lives were ended with impunity.
It’s hardly an anomaly. Which is to clarify that this isn’t about young Mr. Rittenhouse, or about rehashing the deftness of the attorneys or the discernment of the jury. It’s about us. It’s about me. It’s about how life has come to be both the most precious thing of all, and the cheapest. Life, the most volatile fulcrum of political debate; life, the empty plastic bottle tossed out the window and blown along the gutter.
No, that’s a poor metaphor. Plastic bottles are at least recycled. Discarded lives are routinely and ironically mummified like the pharaohs of old and entombed beneath an etched marker as a gesture of honor and respect. And so comes to be in the conduct of our culture this bizarre sacrality of embryo and corpse, sandwiching worthlessness in-between. Holiness in promise and memory, but about the actual neighbors moving in our midst? Not so much.
It’s hard to comprehend how we collectively descended into this irrationality; how this aspirationally idealistic people – nominally neutral but functionally, fiercely religious – could become so inured to the embodiment of life while philosophically fawning over the concept of it. It’s the old absurdity, writ large: “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.”
But God had better watch out. Almost everything turns out to be more important than those who are living and moving among us – our guns, our property, our “freedoms”, our “way of life.” A virus might kill us all, but we are apparently willing to expend our last breath defending our right to contract it – and spread it. A man falls asleep in his car in the fast food drive-through lane? Shoot him and tow him out of the way so that the rest of us can get our pink slime burger. The election not go your way? Mob the Capitol and attempt to hang the one you believe responsible.
Because lives are cheap – except when they haven’t yet been born, and after they have had the decency to die and get out of our way.
Unfortunately, the odds are increasing that “we” will one of these days be viewed as the cheap impediment in someone else’s way. Perhaps that will be the moment I remember how precious life actually is.
And having been “wonderfully, fearfully made”, worth the nuisance of honoring and protecting – even when you make me uncomfortable, or I am in your way.
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