Standing outside a neonatal nursery gazing in on 20 newborns in their bassinets - which lives are the more important? You don't get to meet their parents or learn their last names or discern their skin color - which babies lives are the more important and which the less? - go ahead choose.
We don't even bother to count numbers of civilian death in Irag and Afghanistan and truth be told most in this country don't care - so who here gets to die in some obscure foreign war that we have instigated with their death not even counting?
Who gets to be poor, under privileged, and uneducated and then ignored and even scorned as inferior by we who have everything?
Who gets to be the immigrant worker - working at subsistence levels so our tomatoes remain cheap and plentiful while they suffer, while we look down at them as inferior and unimportant?
Who in this room is it that their pain, suffering, and death is somehow not as real, not as important, as ours - because they are foreign, poor, uneducated, of a different "race" of a different color, practice a different religion - who is it that we can essentially ignore and mistreat because they are 'inferior' and less than human?
Go ahead - you pick.
If you start with the assumption that all human life is equally as important as all other human life then artificial human constructs - political, economic, social, and cultural - that attempt to place a hierarchy on the importance of human life, that stratify 'equal'- cannot stand. If we simply accept that we are all equal - that all human life is as equally important as all other human life - and it is - fairness, peace and prosperity simply must follow. Duh.
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