Oh, the humanity!

(HUNGER GAMES SPOILER ALERT. Skip to the  next paragraph.) During the tribute interviews leading up to the Quarter Quell, the audience in the Capitol is an emotional hot mess. The same spectators who have gleefully taken pleasure in 74 years of watching tributes murder one another are crying, fainting, and calling for change.

Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video, posted to YouTube March 5, 2012, has garnered more than 86 million views and a passionate, albeit rash and emotionally driven*, response from many people (especially teens and young adults). As the video points out, technology enables us to see and connect with people all over the world, in ways we never previously could, and allows us to come face to face with people who had been “invisible” to us. Many are shocked by and distraught about the plight of child soldiers in Africa and, although they don’t know how, want to do something to save them.

 Trayvon Martin is a seventeen-year-old boy who was recently shot and killed. The case was under investigation for awhile, because law enforcement that acts first and thinks later is usually more dangerous than it is protective. However, the case elicited an interesting cultural reaction: people began donning hooded sweatshirts to rally one another to consider Trayvon to be “one of their own” and see from the perspective of Trayvon’s family members. Bloggers and reporters insist that if our children are not safe, no one is.

So, what do the Hunger Games, Kony2012, and Trayvon Martin have in common?  When people recognize someone’s humanity, they do not tolerate his murder.

Some folks argue that a baby isn’t a person until implantation, or until after 120 days, or until he/she can survive outside of the mother, or even until some time after birth, but scientific advances are making it harder and harder to deny that life begins at conception. That is why ultrasound technology is such a key player in the pro-life movement. An ultrasound reveals not a clump of tissue, but a little human being. Upon seeing her baby and hearing his or her little, beating heart, a mother’s anxiety is often overshadowed by awe, respect, protectiveness, compassion, or love.

Abortion ends the lives of three to four thousand little kids every single day in the USA, and that will continue for as long as we tell ourselves that they are not people. 

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” – Mother Teresa

*I am fully in favor of rescuing child soldiers, but for reasons I do not wish to get into here, I don’t think Kony2012 can accomplish that.