(Wikimedia Commons)
The despicable murderer Syed Farooq and the despicable murderess Tashfeen Malik are receiving a great deal of attention, as they should.
But I see it as a moral duty not to permit the victims of their crime simply to be forgotten. They were people, irreplaceable, infinitely valuable, with uniquely individual lives and experiences and hopes and capacities and potentials.
And they’re gone. Lost to us.
Here are brief and, necessarily, grossly inadequate portraits of them, from the Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-shooting-victims-htmlstory.html
May God bless them and their memories.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572-1631)
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