A news story caught my eye when I logged onto the internet today; CNN is reporting (with accompanying video) that a two year old girl was run over by two trucks outside a hardware market in China’s Guangdong province while her mother was shopping. A van struck her, crushing her with his front tires, paused, and then continued on and ran over her again with his rear tires and drove away. Onlookers, cyclists, and other motorists ignored her and did nothing to aid her (while some did swerve to avoid her body in the street), and shortly thereafter, another truck ran over her again. The security camera footage shows that seven minutes passed by while the girl lay in the street bleeding before a trash collector finally came to her aid, picked her up and went to find the mother. Taken to the hospital, the little girl is in a coma on a respirator, listed in critical condition and not expected to survive.

Now, the country is apparently experiencing some collective angst as they try to figure out “how” something like this could happen – that is, the callousness and apathy of not just the driver(s) who didn’t stop (after committing the crime), but the many people who were not compelled in any way to help a bleeding, helpless child.

“Many people are discussing what they perceive as a loss of morality in Chinese society,” she (CNN’s Enuice Yoon) said to Erroll Barnett. “…some observers have been pointing out that China education system really has failed here, that it’s failed to emphasize and reinforce the need to respect human life at a time when 1.3 billion people all clamoring and rushing to climb up the economic and social ladder.”

It is not China’s education system that has failed; it’s a greater failure; it’s a human failure, and it’s not just China – it’s global. If we, as a world, reject God, then there is no logical impetus for us to be compassionate, kind, or merciful.

The cold indifference to the plight of a little girl so brutally injured should be no surprise to anyone in a country where individual rights mean nothing to the greater machine that runs the society. In a country where the government decides who gets to live and who gets to die, who gets to speak and who gets silenced, and most importantly, where women are forced to abort babies against their will every single day, because the government has decided that “for the greater collective economic success” of the country, families can only have one child….why is anyone surprised? The results are that life has no intrinsic value; the government reigns as “god”; and the only value people hold is what they can offer to the state.

Why are the people surprised? Why is the world outraged? The detachment and indifference to the horror of what happened to this little girl is a natural, and not surprising, result of a world gone mad that has propagated the belief that we can decide and determine which life is valuable and which life isn’t.

If life is not precious in the womb, then life is not precious outside of the womb. Once you draw a line and put some people on one side of that line, and some on the other side, then you have in effect declared that no life has value.