The Cost of Innocent Suffering in Life and Literature
Twenty-seven school shootings mark the midpoint of 2022. An ambiguous number, much like twenty-seven apples in a barrel or twenty-seven miles to a gallon. It is already disturbing that such horror is allowed to roll off the tongue with an anonymous descriptor. Twenty-seven.
The Uvalde Massacre, which the New York Times has labeled as the deadliest school shooting so far, is just the most recent of the many tragedies that have taken place over the past six months. Most of these shootings are held in our hearts for a few moments and then forgotten, as they are replaced by a fresh wound needing our care and attention. The more lives lost, the more articles written. An evil so shocking and inhumane is on track to become casual. It is no surprise to any American teenager to hear that another school shooting has happened, even one on a magnitude such as the Uvalde Massacre.
A child’s suffering is universally considered one of the greatest tragedies in our existence. Whole mankind works tirelessly to eliminate suffering from the world, whether it is sickness or hunger. We feel most motivated when that sickness is the cancer in a young girl or a little boy fighting starvation in a third world country.
Fyodor Dostevosky is popular for his exploration of suffering. He guides the reader through man’s relationship with injustice and suffering, and attempts to transcend these themes, accepting injustice and suffering to leave them behind. Certain tragedies of everyday life are worth swallowing as necessary burdens. This is a theme most prominent in The Brothers Karamazov. The Karamazov brothers are known for their corrupt and degenerate natures. Rather than fight these inherent evils, the characters are more often seen to accept them within themselves and others. Characters who find peace with their suffering are described as the most actualized. In a conversation between two Karamazov brothers, Alyosha and Ivan, the reader is presented with a deeply disturbing ethical and emotional problem. Ivan accepts the general suffering of man as the cost we all must pay for existence. He cannot find it within himself, however, to accept the suffering of the innocent, more specifically, children.
“If everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? … I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child… and if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price.”
Ivan discusses his quarrels with a Chrsitian God and why he respectfully refuses a place in His kingdom if it means forgiving everyone, even those who have harmed the innocent children. If an afterlife of eternal harmony, or even existence at all, comes at the cost of such an evil, is it even worth the price? Is it worth existing in a reality where schools teeming with bright, young, and innocent hearts are subjected to the kind of violence you would only expect in an overly gruesome television show?
Children have suffered and will always suffer, but in our technologically and morally advanced civilization, how can we go another day allowing such an unnecessary and disgusting evil to take place? And on twenty-seven separate occasions in only half of a year? What exactly is wrong with our society that it might allow such an evil to be ignited in the first place, much less nourish it into a raging forest fire, where everywhere one turns there seems to be more and more of the same senseless murder? If politicians are keen to overturn Roe v. Wade to protect the lives of the innocent unborn, why are they not also keen to pass tighter firearm legislation to protect the innocent lives of the children that are already alive and breathing? At this point, shouldn’t everyone be willing to try anything at all to bring an end to such unnecessary suffering?