Americans are not the only Humans

Anti-War quotes the loathsome John Derbyshire’s bragging that he was not moved by the deaths of Egyptians in the loss of the Red Sea ferry: http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P2628_0_1_0. I presume that Derbyshire is a nihilist and that he has no pretensions to Christianity.

Unfortunately, Derbyshire is not alone in considering people who live far away as inhuman, especially if they are members of a different ethnic category or religion. We Americans don’t count the Iraqi or Afghan dead or displaced. We count only human casualties, i.e. Americans.

Last night, I caught part of a documentary “Terror’s Children” on Discovery Time. The film followed the lives of a number of Afghan children and their families in a refugee camp in Pakistan. They were very human. These children work, sometimes more than one job, to help their desperately poor families, and they have little hope for the future. Their lives are hard and have been made harder by US foreign adventurism, and it would not be surprising if these children grew up hating America. It would be surprising if they did not.