Childermas - Pakistan - 2014

Childermas is the old name for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, memorializing the children killed by King Herod of Judea, when he discovered that the Magi would not return from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to divulge the information where Jesus was born.

Childermas comes early this year.

At least 120 people, students ranging from elementary to high school, and teachers were killed in Peshawar, Pakistan, in an attack upon a school by a group called Tahreek-e-Taliban.

The Taliban groups has decided it is inefficient to kill children one at a time by shooting them in the head as they stand waiting for a school bus. Better to kill them in masses.

The above picture reminds me of Newtown, Massachusetts, pictured below-

where again we saw children and teachers under attack.

Neither politics nor religion explain the monstrosity in Pakistan, nor does psychology explain the monstrosity in Massachusetts. What factor other than the perversely successful  strategem of attacking the undefended drives these attacks?

Think back. Did we not just recall the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I?
And was it not that war that most supremely devalued the lives of male soldiers? And did not that war begin the devaluation of the lives of the non-combatants, the women and children?
Then were not women and children, the sick and elderly, included in the targets of World War II?
And are not the innocent included now in imprecise attacks, and are not their deaths put down to collateral damage?

Have we not been on a 100 year killing spree?
And has not that devaluation of life infected every nation of the world?

Stand up and be counted, then. Are we too enamored of the king of Judaea? Are we Herodean, or are we Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, and all other religions of the Holy?

So far we have been Herodean, and we think that the end justifies the means.
I saw Vice-President Cheney on television. He thinks the end justifies the means.

There is a moral equivalence among monsters. They do not realize that sometimes somethings must not be done. Period!  Words are infinite, but sometimes things cannot be even imagined.

Vultures of a feather feast together.

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