Since the bombing of London seems to be everywhere, I'll throw a couple thoughts out. The running figure Google has for car accident deaths is over 40,000 a year in the US. (Forbes, for example.)
Loosely speaking, that means 110+ people day every day from highway deaths. About 16,000 a year (44/day) from vehicle-on-vehicle crashes. I'm sure the UK numbers are vastly smaller, as they have a smaller population. Loosely speaking, what happened in London (50+ dead, ~1,000 injured) a couple days ago is a partial snapshot of what happens every day in America on our roads. It's just that instead of being spread out over 50 states and thousands of miles, it's concentrated in one city at one moment of time.
I'm not a big fan of terrorism. I'm all for realistic security. But it's a little strange to me that if we fiddled with vehicle safety, I might be much safer. Of course, the automotive lobby is probably more powerful in Washington than Al Queda. (I don't mean to be callous or unsympathetic to those affected by the attacks; for those who lost friends and family, it's a tragic time.)
One other thought: I often think of Jesus' words when discussing those who dead as a result of a tower's collapse:
Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them - —do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.I wonder what terrorism (and car deaths) do with our introspection. Do we take the time to seriously ponder our standing with God? Do we take the time to consider the standings of those around us? I find myself easily rushed along by the "need" to fight off terrorists, rally for the best new justice, deal with the latest emergency that I loose sight of the issues that remain consistently most important.
And yet given the chance to make a social commentary on injustice, acts of God, or philosophical musing, Jesus brought people back to a simple point: Repent or perish.
2 comments:
I am having such a hard time taking in your perspective... You are right, it makes sense, but I just can't compare car accidents with what happened in London.
As humans, we react to death around us very differently depending on both its cause and its suspected underlying degree of "randomness." Our reactions, and rightfully so, shift drastically depending on whether we witness the (unexpected) death of a loved one through suicide, a car collision, a car collision due to a drunk driver, or a carefully planned attack such as terrorism. Even there we have some degree of randomness though: if only a person had stopped to tie their shoe and missed the subway, he or she wouldn't have been killed. I think that we tend to blame the perceived "source" of the death (terrorists, the drunk driver, sometimes ourselves even) and it affects the type of reactions we experience (sadness, anger, confusion, etc). But we also tend to want to attribute randomness to something too, and when random really is random, that can be hard.
Shifting the perspective to the person who died however, for them, death is death. It probably just boils down to that -- though there may be exceptions. Perhaps when addressing the crowds, Jesus encouraged us to put ourselves in the shoes of the person who just died rather than focusing on our immensely human reactions to death, injustice, and randomness. When we die, death is death. When loved ones or strangers die around us though, Yi, I agree: it's hard to categorize death as just one thing. I don't think that we're meant to -- our emotions are built into us for a reason.
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