Thanks to Diana C.
Relentless mass shootings, a million dead from Covid — How much do we value a single life?
A memorial in Uvalde, Texas.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times
By Elizabeth Dias in the NYT
Two days after the massacre of children in Uvalde, Texas, and 12 days after the racist mass killing in Buffalo, Chenxing Han, a chaplain and teacher, told a Buddhist parable.
A man is shot with a poisoned arrow, Ms. Han recounted as she drove a group of high school seniors to visit a Thai temple in Massachusetts.
The arrow piercing his flesh, the man demands answers. What kind of arrow is it? Who shot the arrow? What kind of poison is it? What feathers are on the arrow, a peacock’s or a hawk’s?
But all these questions miss the point, the Buddha tells his disciple. What is important is pulling out that poison arrow, and tending to the wound.
“We need to be moved by the pain of all of the suffering. But it is important that we are not paralyzed by it,” Ms. Han said. “It makes us value life because we understand life is very precious, life is very brief, it can be extinguished in a single instant.”
Recent days have revealed an arrow lodged deep in the heart of America. It was exposed in the slaughter of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, and when a gunman steeped in white supremacist ideology killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket. The United States is a nation that has learned to live with mass shooting after mass shooting.
And there are other arrows that have become subsumed into everyday life. More than one million people have died from Covid, a once unimaginable figure. The virus is now the third-leading cause of death, even with the availability of vaccines in one of the most medically advanced countries in the world. An increase in drug deaths, combined with Covid, has led overall life expectancy in America to decline to a degree not seen since World War II. Police killings of unarmed Black men continue long past vows for reform.