We're supposed to be better

Earlier today, this video popped up on my facebook feed because a friend "liked" it. The caption was "ISIS Tank Gets Smoked By Brimstone Missile."

I watched in awe as what was once a tank becomes, in a fraction of a second, an enormous fireball surrounded by debris. I even laughed, that weird laugh of disbelief and amazement. It's...pretty amazing - and frightening - what we can do...to make a tank just disappear, without anyone seeing it coming.

And then I felt a little sick, because I remembered that in all likelihood, it wasn't just a tank, an inanimate piece of metal, that had exploded. Amid that debris was a body, created in the image of God.In the middle of that explosion, a man had died: A man that God Himself had come into the world to save. And I had watched it happen - more than that, I had approved of it, for the sheer spectacle of it.

And then I looked at the comments, and I literally wanted to vomit. I still feel a little sick to my stomach, because those comments - all of them American, and almost all of them almost certainly coming from those who would characterize themselves as Christian - demonstrated a disdain for human life that has a whole hell of a lot more in common with ISIS than with any kind of Christianity or even deistic 'Murican morality .


A picture of a man burning to death, with the caption "How do you like your terrorists...Sunni side up?"


A picture of an armed jet, labeled "72 Virgin Dating Service."


An image of an actual corpse flying through the air, captioned "Its a bird! Its a plane! No...its a flying dead goat----er."

And one comment that just summed up the whole thread:

"I love those kind of Muslims, the dead ones."

I'm putting this post away now. Maybe when I come back to it, I'll have a way to finish it that doesn't involve me staring blankly at the screen.

I'm back. It's later. And I still can't figure out a way to end it, without merely stating and restating the obvious. This is horrifying. This shouldn't be. We're supposed to be better than that.

We're supposed to be better.