The Overlooked Life

Recently, I saw a story on ESPN and MLB.com about a young pitcher, Nick Adenhart, who died as a passenger in a hit-and-run accident. I will admit that I completely ignored what little was said about the other passengers in the car, two of whom were dead at the scene. There was so little said (and that only in the ESPN article) that I naturally assumed that not many people would be interested.

Then, on facebook, I see a friend with an R.I.P. message to Courtney Stewart, and I ask what happened. She tells me that Courtney had been her friend, and that she had been killed in a car accident with her friend... Nick Adenhart.

Inside of me, I felt like something was so wrong with this scene. Something in our society tells us that one person's death matters more than another, and so one gets tributes on national television, while another is mentioned on a third-tier news website which lists "TMZ" as a main source. To me, it just feels wrong.

I wonder what this world would be like, if we considered every life important? What if Mother Teresa wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime type of person, and no one slipped into the margins of society? I'm not saying that the young lady who died, or the other two young men involved in the crash, were in the margins of society... far from it, the girl was a college cheerleader, and from what I hear, an amazing all around person. I also certainly don't want to detract from the tragedy of Adenhart's death, because the loss of a young Major Leaguer with so much potential is a modern-day tragedy by definition.

I simply think there is something wrong with a world indifferent to the toll of AIDS in Africa (5800+ Africans die of AIDS each day) yet utterly captivated by the loss of one baseball player.