Asking All the Wrong Questions about Discrimination
Whether we want to admit it or not, all the Sikhs, the white supremacist-connected Wade Michael Page, the police officer he killed in Oak Creek, WI were created in the Image of God. Whether we will accept it or not, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman both were made in the Image of God. Whether we can find compassion in our hearts or not, every person gunned down in the streets of Chicago (both innocent and complicit)— and every person who illegally uses firearms despite gun control laws there—all these people have been made in the Image of God—each and every one!
Frankly, we’ve cheapened human life to the point where it seems all that matters is the utility any other person has for us. This is a most disturbing thought.
The blacks in Haiti who died in Tropical Storm Isaac no longer seemed to matter to American media outlets once the feeding frenzy for hyped up death and destruction among American blacks in New Orleans was presumed imminent. American blacks, apparently, have more utility than Haitian ones, if the mainstream media is allowed to make such determinations for us. And yet, there was an odd sense of news anchor disappointment in a rapidly downgraded storm with so few deaths from the former Hurricane Isaac. The number of deaths, by the way, pales in comparison to the number of homicides in Chicago just last weekend.
Why would that be? Poverty surely exists in both cases. Was it that gang members and any innocent victims don’t seem to matter much because there’s no utility of their lives for people in the news media? There is no political gain, advertising upside, no dirty laundry that anyone cares to see? Are gang shootings not as important because they’re not happening all at once as a massacre which would gain more viewers? That is how it appears, if the amount of media coverage is any indication. The fact doesn’t change. The same number of people died–whether it was as a firing line of execution or a string of gang-related murders across Chicago.
Why is there so little compassion?
I’d argue that it’s because there was no utility for these human lives in the eyes of media producers because these deaths don’t arouse our sympathies. It doesn’t sell. No utility. I’m horrified at this!
It’s a bit reminiscent of Boxer the horse being sent off to the glue factory in Orwell’s classic Animal Farm–only worse because it’s real. Boxer, having lost his strength, was of more use dead than alive to those other animals who were “more equal than others.” The pigs could buy whiskey (bought with the selling of Boxer) and did not have to pay a pension (which would have cost the pigs something).
Utility–defined by those who are powerful–is a measurement of another person’s worth and a wrongful determination which is made by bigoted people, powerful bigoted people.
Utility becomes an abusing of a class of perceived lessers for personal gain, so that those with political power can appear bigger, better, more generous or magnanimous. Minorities are held up as window dressing or held down in financial dependence. It is discrimination at its ugliest and slavery of a different kind. It is worldly. It is evil. And it is at the root of the Holocaust, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
Contrast utility with the Image of God, as the Bible teaches.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27)
We fail to see things rightly because too many people do what is right in their own eyes. Too many have rejected the Bible’s teachings, rejected God Himself, and don’t see the Image of God in any human, period. It is why they serve a lesser god of utility…that looks remarkably similar to the man in the mirror.
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