It’s easy to assign Importance factors or risk categories to inanimate objects such as buildings, bridges, airplanes, dams, cars, and buses. It is agreeable to say that the structural integrity of a hospital is more important than that of a single family residence; especially, in the case of an emergency. When assigning importance or value to individual lives, we are confronted by an overwhelming social dilemma: How does society assign value to someone’s life? The essence of life or simply living and given the opportunity to become a contributing member of society is priceless and has an unsurmountable monetary value; however, within the constraints of the society we live in, we are forced to assign a monetary value to an individual life. If we strip away what makes us human – our souls— we can assign value and categorize human life by the sum of their contributions to society and the impact their absence would make.
Those that commit horrible crimes and contribute negatively to society belong to the first category. Those who contribute very little or haven’t had the chance to contribute to society belong to the second category. Those contributors whose sudden absences affect a small amount of people belong to the third category. Those whose sudden absence affects many people belong to the fourth. Finally, those whose sudden absence can affect an entire society for generations to come belong to the fifth category.
Murderers and individuals who wish harm on innocent people belong in the first category. They are in the first category due to their lack of contribution and harm to our society. Truly without them there would be less damage and fear in today’s world. You can easily distinguish the difference between the first and second category in the perspective of comparing them to someone in the second category, such as children and individuals whose lives were cut short, and sadly unable to even begin to contribute to society; the ones