Short conversational excerpt from a YouTube video by Chris Collins in which Collins and another speaker discuss how governments, religious leaders, and institutions decide which lives are treated as meaningful or disposable. They reference letters from threatened families, a pastor telling victims "God no longer wants you here," and disturbing examples such as teachers killing students—framing the discussion around moral failure, dehumanization, and historical tragedy.
The life that is meaningful.
To any organ, to any government, is only what they choose it to be. Right. Like, it is not these people's lives. And they knew it, which was the tragedy of it. Like, they felt it at the time. Like, oh, our lives are not meaningful to the outside world. That's where you get these letters, like the title of Going back to the title of the book. They send that letter, we'll be killed tomorrow with our families. And. And the response is, well, then you're going to die. We can't help you.
Oh, it's worse than that. The one pastor says, God no longer wants you here.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's brutal.
Brutal pastor.
Yeah.
You're a part of his congregation. Like, that's a. The, the religious part is interesting too.
Yeah. And as like a father of a five year old, there's a. There's a big chunk about, like, teachers killing their students. And you're like, that's.
Yeah. And the girls that wouldn't turn in. Yeah, they wouldn't.
At the end of the book, this group of murderers shows up to this girl's school and says, okay, split up Hutus and Tutsis. And they say, you, we're Rwandan. So instead of just killing one or the other, they kill all of them. That sounds heroic to say, but they were doing it for their own dignity. There wasn't anybody watching. There wasn't anybody there. So you have that element too, of this sense of you have these people betraying a sort of human decency, a human morality, for nothing, and then you have these other people standing up for themselves also for nothing.
