Standards for killing

An Iranian woman can still be sentenced to death by stoning for having an illicit relationship outside of marriage. It’s difficult to comprehend how any society in the modern world could engage in a practice so counter to the concept of civilized behavior.

But our astonishment seems more at how the verdict is carried out than the death sentence itself. And specifically at any society that persists in such a savage practice. It’s only people in that retrograde culture, not us, who commit such heinous atrocities under the umbrella of law.

The concept of civilized behavior, when we apply it to our actions, seems to be weighed on a different scale. We seem entirely comfortable with our own methods of slaughtering our fellow human beings, especially if, as Voltaire put it, the killing is done “… in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

Shouldn’t we be likewise troubled when a drone aircraft in Afghanistan, controlled by satellite signal from a computer halfway around the world at a military base in Nevada, launches a bomb or rocket that inadvertently destroys an Afghan neighborhood and its innocent residents?

Oops, there’s another “my bad” – what they call “collateral damage.”

Dave Vent

Spokane