Virginia Tech Massacre - Lesson One

It's difficult to imagine the personal reality of those who were there watching Cho walk around and kill their classmates. It's also difficult to imagine that worse horrors than this occur every single day outside of our relatively safe borders. If we are at all sympathetic to the victims (dead and living) of Virginia Tech, let’s also be mindful of those people who suffer this kind of tragedy every day.

Last year the first scientific analysis of the Iraqi death toll announced that as many as 655,000 people died as a result of the invasion, which is an average of an extra 2519 people per week attributed to our presence in Iraq (33 people died in Virginia). Even if the figures are not universally accepted, we're still speaking about ridiculously large numbers of people.

In the last two years, somewhere around 300,000 people have been killed or died specifically due to the violence in Darfur. Currently, two million Sudanese people from Darfur are displaced and living in aid-dependent camps in Chad, many dying from abject neglect.

So sure, Virginia Tech is a tragedy, no doubt about it . . . I want that kind of thing to stay as far away from me and my family as is possible. But our reaction to it, in the media in particular, demonstrates the inequity of our concerns for human life. Christianity is supposed to be a global concern for the entire human race. At one Christian university I know about, they’re having a prayer vigil for the people at Virginia Tech.

I only mention this because it seems to be a fairly standard response by churches and Christian organizations and it is indeed a good and proper response. But, I’m yet to see popular prayer vigils for the literally millions of people who have suffered because of our presence in Iraq, or for the two million displaced from Darfur, almost all of whom have lost loved ones due to the violence there. I’m yet to see popular prayer vigils for the millions of people world wide adversely affected by our economic and environmental practices.

What I walk away with here is that Virginia Tech and other tragedies like it evidence that popular Christianity here in the US has a deeply seated materialism (big surprise!): it’s only worth praying about if it could happen to us. If it’s happening elsewhere and there’s no danger of it hurting us, then we can comfortably ignore it. No prayer vigil necessary.