The way that over 70 refugees from Syria - children, women, and men - have been found, suffocated to death, in an abandoned lorry (truck) in Austria, can only recall such horrors as the Nazi period, when Jews were some times killed in a similar way by the SS. The horror this time is that, seemingly devoid of any ideology of hate, these human traffickers simply seem to have carelessly wired the unventilated back shut and killed their cargo for no other reason than indifference or clumsiness. What remains - hardly new but still never acceptable in human history - is the idea that some lives do not matter as much as others.
The sense that some humans are no more than rubbish, to be treated callously, whose lives do not matter, are not precious, should not be preserved. If there is any ethical or religious position that states otherwise, so be it, but it seems to me that the finally most vital rule of conduct must be to always keep aware of how every one else - every human person - is equally deserving of whatever it is we'd have done or given to us (including food, shelter, water, safety, dignity, and compassion). Human cruelty to other humans is not rare - it may even be hard-wired into a portion of the population (or all) - it is the worst of our behaviour, and we must do more in our societies to protect those most vulnerable to the sort of humans (often in gangs) who use and abuse humans as if they were mere meat, mere garbage.
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