Why I Love This Country, Rough Draft:

I wanted to make a brief comment about how surreal it is that people are in a fear-frenzied uproar with the recent school shooting: Don't people know that sort of violence is fairly common throughout most of the world, and how incredibly fortunate we are to be insulated from it?

For a brief while I studied the genocides that have occurred on nearly every continent, where hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered en masse-- corpses littering the streets and sidewalks, the smell of rotting flesh, the buzz of flies everywhere, occuring with such regularity that it became common in some cultures. In many cultures on this very day, it remains common.

Losing 32 people is a tragedy I can't begin to imagine; I can appreciate, however, that we are so protected in this country that the entire nation reels when these types of things happen. But honestly, when compared to the incidents in the world around us, 32 is a very small number.

At moments like these, I count my blessings that in America, every life is important-- every death makes an impact and is a tragedy. Because, in our country "All Men Are Created Equal", the death of a Holocost survivor with a PhD carries equal weight with a 19 year old still finding her way in the world. I find this profoundly inspiring, and very unique in a world where this is rarely so.