Letter to the Editor: We aren't God, let's stop acting like it

The following column is a submitted Letter to the Editor from Zach Donaldson, an Ohio U alumn and current graduate student studying Political Science.

Please note that the views and opinions of this letter do not reflect those of The New Political.

On Wednesday, a 31-year-old man was shot and killed in front of his wife and children on a college campus in Utah. Just a few months prior, a 55-year-old woman and her husband were fatally shot in their Minnesota home. In December of last year, a 50-year-old man was murdered walking outside of his hotel. Since October 7th, 2023, over 64,000 Palestinians have died in the Gaza Strip. In the past 25 years, over 200 people have been killed in school shootings in the United States. I know I have missed others. Humans imparting the most brutal cruelty to other humans is nothing new. Not in America, not abroad, not in any time or in any place has genuine peace been a reality.

I am not bereft of nuance. I don’t write this to equivocate contexts and circumstances. Death is complex, tragic, and nuanced. 

These atrocities should spark discussions that need to be had about the health of our institutions, the power of our rhetoric, and the implications our laws have on our safety. People should not be forced to mourn and process these things identically: that is a conversation humans have to have with their heart, and their heart alone. 

I don’t write today to pretend to know what the political or policy solutions for our myriads of problems with violence are. I write this to pose a simple challenge to anyone who cares to read it; can we stop pretending to play God publicly when we talk about these things?

As carnage swept Utah and Colorado this Wednesday, the world attempted to impose intellectualism onto emotion. Social media became a swirling battleground, rife with divergent dialogues of martyrdom, political violence, mass shootings, and genocide. Blood splattered onto phone screens as images of the aforementioned assassinations, famines, and funerals became vehicles for Instagram declarations and cable network outrage. Death was pitted against death, and fingers were pointed against fingers. Some people mourned and some people cheered. 

There is only one thing I am certain we shared: that few people left that moment with any more unity, clarity, or direction towards our commonality. That’s unfortunate - because death should be perhaps the most leveling sight of all.

To see a human being’s final moment, to watch them bleed the same blood that courses through our veins, and to observe the fear in their eyes before their body is lain on the ground is something that defies explanation. If there is a base aspirational value we should all agree on it is this: killing another human being is always, and without qualification, an unmitigated tragedy.

Yet as is contemporary of our political environment, our humanity did not win the day. We felt a need to qualify and scale the validity of different lives as if such a notion were reducible to a science fair project. We drew lines in the sand about whose hearts were pure based off the infographics they chose to repost in the last two years. We thought far too much and felt far too little. We attempted to answer questions that we don’t have the right to ask.

The minute we decide that we get to flagrantly and publicly pass judgment on a person’s death to prove a point: we have assumed a power we were never supposed to have.

There are evil ideals in the world. Bigotry in all forms should be derided, complicity in tragic deaths should be called out, and the problems of this country which make life nasty, brutish, and short for so many should continue to be worked on. Yet pouring vinegar on the grave of someone or using people’s deaths as pawns in a conversation is deeply antithetical to that mission. No one is motivated to become a better person in a marketplace of blame and shame. It is a deeply sad and self-serving act disguised as moral superiority.

I cannot prognosticate where we go from here. I don’t pretend to know the answers or act as if I speak with impunity. All I know is this: compassion, decency, and a reverence for our common humanity need not be things that go out of style. They shouldn’t have to be conditional or qualified. Their practice shouldn’t be based on reciprocity, but an appeal to a higher sense of purpose and truth. They aren’t always the satisfying or even empirically sensible ways to think, feel, or act: but they are never the wrong ways. In a time where little comforts us or gives us certainty, they indeed may be the only sure last bets we have. 

So, I pray for the Kirks, for the Hortmans, for the Robertsons, and for the victims of any and all unjustified and unspeakable atrocities without qualification. I pray for those I will never understand, and I pray that we will all come to understand one another.