Why Life Is Precious

By Keith Boykin
Monday, January 1 2007, 2:32PM

If someone had told me on Christmas Eve that the godfather of soul, a former U.S. president, the former Iraqi president and a prominent NFL player would all be dead by New Year's Day, I'm not sure I would have believed it. But it happened. The godfather of soul, James Brown, died on Christmas Day. Former president Gerald Ford died the next day. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was executed in Baghdad on new year's eve. Then we learned just hours before midnight that the American military death toll in Iraq had reached 3,000. And this morning we woke to the news that Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Although the news of the past week seems uniquely focused on death, I continue to believe that human life is precious. And I believe that we as humans are far too careless about life. For all the debate about abortion, there seems relatively little concern about protecting and valuing human life once a child is born. For all the concern about crime rates and murder, there seems to be precious little mainstream interest in protecting the lives of people like Sean Bell or Michael Sandy. And for all the rhetoric about creating a "culture of life," that culture seems altogether missing when we launch unnecessary wars that kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of our own soldiers.

Yes, I believe in life. And it is precisely for that reason that I do not support capital punishment. Yet I was surprised to learn that Iraq's president Jalal Talabani objected to the execution of Saddam Hussein on moral grounds because he opposes the death penalty. That seems to me to be an act of courage and principle in an era of demagoguery. For all the murders that Saddam Hussein authorized in the pursuit of his despotic rule, we as humans have no more right to take his life than he had the right to take the lives of those he killed.

But this is not just about Iraq. It is time to do something about the culture of violence that we have created in our world. Violence is not an Arab problem, an American problem or a black problem, as some people would pretend to believe. This is a human problem.

Just look around the world to see the state of our society. From Sudan to Somalia, Baghdad to Beirut, Damascus to Denver, people are killing each other to prove some point they think is worthy of murder. We have created a culture of violence in the world, and now it's time to fix it.

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