Murder of Virginia Tech Students Compared to Poaching Elephants

Talk about human reductionism and diminishing the reality of a profound evil: The following quote is from poet Nikki Giovanni, at the memorial service for the murdered at Virginia Tech:

We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile. WE are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to know when to cry and sad enough to know we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant in the killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokier Nation embraces our own with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness. We are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.

I have absolutely no problem with the allusion to victims of AIDS or children hiding from militias. But the seeming comparison to these murders with elephant poaching is to diminish the evil of the mass murders and engage in outrageous moral relativism. To equate the reaction of a baby elephant with the grief experienced by the victims’ families and school community, was unncessary and gratuitous.

This is not to say, of course, that poaching elephants for their ivory isn’t very wrong. But killing elephants is not morally equivalent to the murder of human beings. If we lose sight of that, we discard human exceptionalism and diminish the perceived value of all human life. This statement was an unintended insult to the students and professors killed at Virginia Tech.