You're Invited! January 2024 Events Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What always need to be made widely public are such instances of immense mass inhumanity.

Black people have been brutalized for centuries, and in the U.S. told they were not welcome — even though they, as a people, had been violently forced to the U.S. from their African home as slaves! And, as a people, there has been little or no reparations or real refuge for them here, since.

Clearly, human lives on this planet are not perceived as being of equal value/worth when, morally speaking, we all definitely should and even could be.

In fact, human beings can actually be perceived and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.

A somewhat similar inhumane devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations.

The worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. ...

Also, it was through Toni Mor­ri­son’s novel Beloved that I rediscovered a con­cept pro­found enough to have be­come a sort of tem­plate of un­der­stand­ing for me about how mor­bidly in­hu­mane the hu­man po­lit­i­cal an­i­mal can be and especially was dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civil War era and institutional slavery.

Within the novel, the narrator notes that, like the South, the Civil War era northern states also hated Black people but happened to hate slavery more.

I then saw how this suc­cinct sum­ma­tion of the ug­li­ness of the politics of dif­fer­ence and scale could be ap­plied else­where: e.g. they hate lib­er­tar­i­ans but hate lib­er­als even more; they loath Semites but de­spise the Pales­tini­ans far more, or hate His­pan­ics but ab­hor the Chi­nese more, etcetera, etcetera.

The novel also made clear that the chil­dren of slave hold­ers had had their in­no­cent minds ter­ri­bly poi­soned by their par­ents’ or guardians’ be­liefs in their right to have hu­man “prop­erty that re­pro­duced it­self with­out cost”, like farm live­stock.