In Almost Daily Dose, the blog section of this site, there is always the chance that I might take a serious turn, and this is one of those times. I wrote the article, Meditation on the Value of a Life, following the Taliban massacre of ten medical aide workers in northern Afghanistan in August 2010. Recently I recalled the story and wondered if it had been updated, but in my heart I knew it hadn’t. Those who died have been all but forgotten by the media, and therefore by most people. There are many more who will not even know they ever lived. In this holiday season, too often marked by over-consumption, in this great nation of ours nearly brought to its knees by corporate greed, at a time in our history when truly terrible things are forgotten in the course of a news cycle, I want to take a moment to remember and give thanks to these men and women, and others like them, who live and sometimes die in the service of humanity. They are the best among us.

Meditation on the Value of a Life

A quarry in Badakhshan, the northeasternmost province of Afghanistan.

If you believe in God, chances are you subscribe to the belief that all people are precious in His eyes, that every life has meaning and value, that we should grieve the execution of a criminal as we do the assassination of a saint.

Moral egalitarianism, widely embraced in our Western world, can feel so right until it is tested. Over the past few days, I have found myself weighing the lives of ten medical aide workers, murdered in Afghanistan by Taliban insurgents, against those of their killers.

The slain men and women were members of a twelve-person team fielded by the Christian aide group, International Assistance Mission, and were providing medical care in Badakhshan province, a remote area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Two team members, both Afghanis, escaped the massacre and are being questioned by the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul.

The victims included six Americans: Tom Little, 62, an optometrist from New York and the team’s leader, who had worked for decades in Afghanistan; Dan Terry, 63, from Wisconsin, another longtime aide worker; Tom Grams, 51, a dentist from Durango, Colorado; Glen Lapp, 40, a Mennonite nurse from Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Cheryl Beckett, 32, a translator, from Knoxville, Tennessee; and Brian Carderelli, 25, a videographer, from Harrisonburg, Virginia. Also killed were Karen Woo, 36, a surgeon from the United Kingdom; Daniela Beyer, 35, from Germany; and two Afghanis, Mahram Ali, 50, and Jawed, 24, who went by only one name.

We hear that, when captured, the aide workers may have been in possession of a bible. Their Taliban captors have accused them of acting as spies and missionaries. The bible story may or may not be true — and does it really matter? Do we behead Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jews for Jesus for proselytizing on the streets of New York? Like it or not, we and the Islamists are centuries apart.

My thoughts move beyond what these slayings mean in political and even religious terms, to the effect they and events like them have on the human ecosystem. The deaths of the ten aide workers was a loss to us all of intelligence, skill, generosity, and courage. These men and women were valuable human assets, and they were murdered by medieval nihilists who bring nothing to the human table but misery.

Doctors Woo, Little, and the others are the promise of our civilization. They studied for years to perfect their crafts, resisting the temptations we all face to half-step through life. I don’t know how they began their careers but I do know that each one eventually chose to work in an unforgiving corner of the world, risking danger, and giving of themselves for far less than market value. Each one traded the promise of solvency and security in the West for the opportunity to bring healing to impoverished communities in a war torn land.

People like these, precious and few, work with shovels, bricks, and bandages to improve the lives of others. We should praise them in our media and in our schools, hold them up to our children as nonpareils of human accomplishment. Our youth search for heroes, hunger for inspiration, and yet, more often than not, we give them wastrels and narcissists to emulate. These ten men and women were the genuine article.

If I were a religious person, perhaps I would call them martyrs, have faith that new heroes will emerge to take their place, like the early Christians who kept on coming, kneeling before the lions, fertilizing Christianity with their blood.

But I’m an agnostic, and I just don’t know.

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