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The Earth thirsts for our blood, but we need not give it so readily.
Are we defending life
when we just pick and choose
lives acceptable to lose
and which ones to defend?
[footnote read J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999, 58.]
Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, in My Lai:
Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired on Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped woman and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps. Pregnant woman had there stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machined-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.
A brave and passionate man will kill or be killed.
A brave and calm man will always preserve life.
Of these two which is good and which is harmful?
How pitiful are sentient beings in Samsara ...
How foolish and sad it is to indulge in killing;
How sad to commit an act that in the end will hurt oneself;
How sad to build a sinful wall of meat, made of one's dying parents' flesh;
How sad to see meat eaten and blood flowing!
We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.
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