The Price of Being Human

 
 It was tragic.  It is tragic.  One man responsible for the deaths of 49 people and injury of countless others.  Or so it seems.  It never is just one person that is involved.  It was all the people that one person was around, who influenced them, who helped them gain access to ways of killing others.  911 was tragic and still is.  Every war is tragic.  All the people that died and for what?  To prove a point?  A cry for help?  Why does any human being have the urge or the want to kill another human being for that matter?  Killing and hurting each other has been going on since the very beginning, whenever that was, and people kill and hurt to prove that point too.  Humans die every day, in fact according to Ecology.com, 55.3 million people die per year, the news could not possibly cover all of the deaths and the multitude of ways humans die; they pick and choose who we see that died and how they died.  The news covers the sports hero, the actor/actress, the politician and maybe a human interest story (their words, their choice).  I am not saying that I will not cry when someone whom I hold dearly in my heart dies, no matter how they die, I will.  I will miss them, I will miss the personality of their being, but I do not believe it will cause me to want to harm another person because of their death.  Death is inevitable.  We as humans know this.  Our time will come.  The majority of us do not know when, so why is it such a surprise when it happens?  Why the ranting and the raving?  Is it because it causes us to face our own mortality?  You hear phrases such as, "Cut down in the prime of life", "Gone too young", but who is making these judgments?  Who is too young, what age is ok to die?  From what vantage point are we making these decisions on how long these people should live?  We have a fascination with life and death.  We are constantly bombarded (well at least here in the Western world) on how to look younger, live longer; eat this, don't eat that, take this pill, use this cream, all in the hopes of holding off death.
      I struggle with all of this.  I struggle with some of my family and friends who are devout Christians, who are good people, but who have no problem "protecting themselves and their things" from others, in anyway possible.  I was brought up in a Christian faith.  My understanding of the Crucifixion and Resurrection was that death was not real.  It is just the price of being human.  There are many other religions, actually according to Wikipedia, around 4200, and they all have some differing beliefs on the reason why we are here and why we die.  They give us a reference point.  According to science (another religion?) we are orbiting the sun at around 67,000 miles per hour.   What do all these figures mean?   Nothing really.  They are all mind games as John Lennon so poetically put into words.  As I am writing this, I am having a deep profound love for the human race and I am going to sit and revel in this feeling because I know it is fleeting and I realize how life is just so tragically beautiful.