Someone left a holier-than-thou comment on the last post and it got me thinking.

With all the crap going on in the world, if we stopped to think about every morally outrageous act � the war crimes, the abuse, the murder, the rape � and to get worked up about every single one of them, it would be as useless as ignoring it all.

How do you prioritize between evil? How do you say, �This man shooting this man is more evil than this woman abusing this boy?� There is no way to put a value on heinous acts. Each act is freshly evil.

Yet in our society, the evil acts conglomerate into a numbing mass. We hear of murder done daily, of fresh horrors in overseas wars. Have we not become desensitized?

And if so, if a single act � a particular, not-necessarily-earthshattering act � gets past the numbness, and speaks to you; if it pricks a heart jaded by everyday acts of evil� how can this be valued at less than if a heart is pricked by a bomb dropped on a city?

By reacting to one, we react to them all. We choose to stand up and say, �This violence committed is wrong�; we are horrified, outraged, saddened, turned to despair, angered, spurred to action on some level.

Who among us has the right to judge if the death of a woman, man, child or animal is more or less important than another? Who are we to say that deforestation, poisoning of crops, or salting of earth deserves less righteous fury than a capsized ferry, a leaking oil tanker?

God cares for all equally. Man, on the other hand, has spent years hacking out a hierarchy where the Earth and Her creatures rank far below us. To me, an animal is as a child. If I am horrified at an animal abused, I am extending that horror to the abuse of all creatures on this Earth. Which includes little girls raped and murdered, elderly men stabbed to death in their apartments, little boys sexually abused by their baseball coaches, and women shot and killed while jogging.

It�s just a pity that compassion doesn�t seem to flow the other way very often.