The story of Susan Ryan's murder (her husband is charged) makes me sad and angry. So pointless, so preventable, and so little political will. It happens over and over again and not enough is done and it will happen again before the year is out, to someone less visible, less attractive to the media, whose murder will therefore be ignored.
But the story of a 4,600-year-old burial site containing a father, a mother, and their two children made me cry.
They'd been killed violently and were buried facing each other. Other burial sites from the same time found nearby, the people in them also killed violently, speak to a raid; the survivors, the archaeologists say, coming back afterwards to bury the dead. I can't help but picture their final moments, a sort of B-movie highlights montage of prehistoric violence, childish screams in the dead of night; and then the survivors returning to dig and cry over the graves.
If it were a father, a mother, and their two children killed violently today in a wealthy western city, it would be front-page news. But these murders were 4,600 years old, and so these bodies are just bones. No one will ever know their names or the cause for which they were all killed. Only that they were loved and mourned.
I want to say that they were people too, and they mattered; but I'm not sure the evidence is on my side. Given the relative weight of this story in newspaper column inches vs. Susan Ryan's, I'm quite sure that the newspaper is not on my side, and presumably neither are the newspaper's readers, and thus, by extension, most of my fellow citizens. It probably is not normal that the murder of a single person whose photograph is splashed all over the front page of major newspapers and whose name and story are both known does not affect me personally as much as the story implied by four ancient skeletons in a pile of dirt. The former I can analyze, I can see the implications, I can be angered. The latter just hurts.
Who cares when it happened? They were a family. They loved each other. They were killed. This is a tragedy.
The story of Susan Ryan's murder (her husband is charged) makes me sad and angry. So pointless, so preventable, and so little political will. It happens over and over again and not enough is done and it will happen again before the year is out, to someone less visible, less attractive to the media, whose murder will therefore be ignored.
But the story of a 4,600-year-old burial site containing a father, a mother, and their two children made me cry.
They'd been killed violently and were buried facing each other. Other burial sites from the same time found nearby, the people in them also killed violently, speak to a raid; the survivors, the archaeologists say, coming back afterwards to bury the dead. I can't help but picture their final moments, a sort of B-movie highlights montage of prehistoric violence, childish screams in the dead of night; and then the survivors returning to dig and cry over the graves.
If it were a father, a mother, and their two children killed violently today in a wealthy western city, it would be front-page news. But these murders were 4,600 years old, and so these bodies are just bones. No one will ever know their names or the cause for which they were all killed. Only that they were loved and mourned.
I want to say that they were people too, and they mattered; but I'm not sure the evidence is on my side. Given the relative weight of this story in newspaper column inches vs. Susan Ryan's, I'm quite sure that the newspaper is not on my side, and presumably neither are the newspaper's readers, and thus, by extension, most of my fellow citizens. It probably is not normal that the murder of a single person whose photograph is splashed all over the front page of major newspapers and whose name and story are both known does not affect me personally as much as the story implied by four ancient skeletons in a pile of dirt. The former I can analyze, I can see the implications, I can be angered. The latter just hurts.
Who cares when it happened? They were a family. They loved each other. They were killed. This is a tragedy.