Dead Children in the News.

One of the things about being a pro-life catholic, is that you don't just count the dead children from your own team. By processing the deaths in Gaza, I'm really steeling myself for the next 9-11 attack on American civilians, or calculating how many classrooms of children exactly, the Israeli army has slaughtered in their defense.

I'd like to see some of our American newspapers do graphics like that: 315 dead Palestinian children -- bloodied and dismembered -- would equal about 10+ Sandy Hook classrooms, where American children were deliberately slaughtered in their youth.

The total toll in Gaza is now approaching 9-11 levels. Will there end up being more than 3,000 Palestinians killed? You betcha! Go Israel -- fight, kill, win!

Looking back, many of the Americans killed on September 11 were grown-ups. They had lived their lives enough, I guess, and were pawns in someone's political statement. Their deaths could have been avoided too. There were some children killed, but not like in Gaza.

Ditto with the Sandy Hook tragedy. That one sure stopped us cold, as a country. But in retrospect... life is tough, even for kids. There's no more right to protection in an American classroom as there is refuge in a UN classroom -- it's a tough, immoral world.

Even the Holocaust, fading now into the background of history... the Nazis didn't dismember the little Jewish children that they had to eliminate, in order to keep their country secure from an unwanted minority. Like Israel with the Palestinians, first they identified the lesser citizens and tried to keep them corralled. Then, they painlessly and efficiently gassed the children. A relatively easy death, compared to how the children in Gaza are being put down today...

Those people who lost lives and limbs in the Boston bombing? Their numbers are nothing compared to what American-paid weaponry is doing to the people packed into the Gaza Strip...

It's hard for me, I admit, to harden myself and accept these deaths as natural. No child deserves to die, or be targeted in wartime. A part within me -- my own strong life force -- can't process this deliberate killing the way it seems everyone else can. Looking, shaking the head sadly, and moving on to sillier things.

These are dead children.
These are deliberate deaths.
American tax money is paying to kill these children.

I don't understand: when we have hopes and dreams for our own pregnant females; when we coo and celebrate and give praise for the healthy births of our own children; when we educate and cheer and acknowledge student growth ... how can we go out and cheapen the lives of others, just because they speak a different language than us, or they've not been blessed to live in freedom and safety?

Why don't more people speak out? Are they afraid? Don't they care about innocent dead?

If you buy into the idea that aborting one child just gives you another chance down the road to have another child under "better" conditions, then why not buy into the idea that if your young toddler dies in the back seat of an overheated car, you can just make another replacement? That was the message in this Pulitzer-Prize winning piece*, it seems... (the dead children aren't the victims, the parents are.)

And if it's ok to kill hundreds of innocent children to effect your own military win -- if killing the kids is the only way to protect your own privileges and land security -- then, it seems, some accept that.

The only good thing about processing these deaths is that when the next Sandy Hook or September 11 occurs, and it is American civilians being ground up in this new normalcy of war, when the world here shuts down and cries and asks, "why? why?", some of us will have already done the hard work of processing these types of deaths.

You want us to accept this as okay when it is someone else's children, but to act outraged when it is our own. This life v. that life, instead of seeing it all as life.

I could never accept living like that, but plenty of people do. As long as their tabs are paid, their travel covered, their needs gratified... that's life to them.
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*

“I don’t feel I need to forgive myself,” she says plainly, “because what I did was not intentional.”
...
As part of her plan to simplify her life, Lyn Balfour has quit her job. It’s going to get a little more complicated soon, because she’s pregnant again: The insemination that she had on that day in October was successful. The baby is due in July.

Balfour’s lawyers petitioned the court to get the record of her prosecution expunged. Such a request is usually unopposed after an acquittal, in recognition that a legally innocent person has a right to start again with a legally clean slate. But in this case, Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman challenged it and, unusually, argued the relatively small legal battle himself.

Outside the courthouse, Chapman explained: “It’s very rare to oppose expungement. But we are, because of the enormity of this case, because it is the sole public record of the death of a completely defenseless and helpless infant.”

After a half-day hearing, the judge ruled for the commonwealth, saying Balfour had failed to prove that she would suffer a “manifest injustice” if the court records remained unsealed.

Afterward, Balfour calmly answered questions from the news media, as always. She was unemotional, unapologetic, on message. She will consider an appeal. She will continue to speak out for greater public awareness of the dangers of leaving children alone in cars. She sounded, as always, just a little bit cold.
...
Braiden is 91/2 months old, exactly the age Bryce was when he died. Lyn has been having nightmares again.

Just before the tragedy, she had two dreams that seem to her, in retrospect, like foreboding. In one, she accidentally drowned Bryce; in the other, it was death by fire. Balfour believes these dreams were sent by God to help prepare her for what she was about to endure.

Recently she dreamed she lost control of Braiden’s stroller, and it rolled out into traffic. No, she doesn’t think it’s the same thing, happening again.

“I couldn’t take it again,” Jarrett says quietly.
...
“Can you imagine losing your only child and not having a hope of having another? Can you imagine that despair?”

That’s why, she says, she’s made a decision. She’s checked it out, and it would be legal. There would be no way for any authority to stop it because it would fall into the class of a private adoption. She’d need a sperm donor and an egg donor, because she wouldn’t want to use her own egg. That would make it too personal.

What is she saying, exactly?

Miles and Carol Harrison deserve another child, Balfour explains measuredly. They would be wonderful parents.

This is the woman you either like or don’t like, right away. She is brassy and strong-willed and, depending on your viewpoint, refreshingly open or abrasively forward. Above all, she is decisive.

Balfour says she’s made up her mind. If Miles and Carol Harrison are denied another adoption, if they exhaust all their options and are still without a baby, she will offer to carry one for them, as a gift.

Children's lives as potato chips:
you dispose of 'em, we'll make more!