I recently turned 78 in September of this year. As I look back over the last ten years or so, I have come to realize just how consequential and remarkable the gift of life is. I have also come to style it as the Joy of Life.
Yet, in American society today, the value of human life has been greatly diminished. America is confronted with thousands of homeless people on her streets, the hundreds of homicides in our major cities have become just a statistic, and almost a million babies are aborted every year.
The total number of abortions that have been performed is over 60 million since the ruling by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Reflect on the magnitude of that number for a minute. That number is even more horrific when we see that approximately 38 percent of these babies were black when blacks represent only 14 percent of our population.
Apparently, these black lives do not matter. As a citizen of America, I have to wonder why not. All lives matter, especially the lives of babies. These aborted babies will never have a chance to grow up and experience the joy of life. That realization exceedingly saddens me.
The taking of a human life, any human life, is a horrific act, whether or not such an action is sanctioned by society or not, as in the case of an abortion. I do not understand how any society can survive when it contravenes the natural law of a right to life.
Sadly, many, if not most of us, take life for granted, and most of us are inured to the death and desolation we see every day around us and in the world. It is only when we have a near-death experience (as I did in 2008) or we suffer the loss of a sibling, a parent, or a dear friend that we are gobsmacked and begin to understand. Life is truly precious. And the younger generations have it right and have an acronym for it as well: YOLO or You Only Live Once. How true that statement is when we view it retrospectively.
Links
External: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
Internal: https://whitebeardwisdom.com/product/a-new-desiderata-for-the-21st-century-2/