I suspect that when we die, everything stops. Everything cuts to black. The ending of The Sopranos was literally true. I have no desire to convince anybody that I’m right.
The logical extension of an existence that ends suddenly, one where you no longer perceive anything in an instant, is that the only truly valuable thing in a human life is the continuation of it. For as much as life as a precious commodity is spoken of as a fundamental truth, existence on the mortal coil of Earth is definitionally more valuable to a person who believes that there is no afterlife than that there is one, even if it were an unpleasant one. There is emptiness to martyrdom—those who die for a noble cause, those whose deaths indirectly benefit society, don’t even get to know that their premature deaths were not in vain.
I am, as an American, constantly reminded that large swaths of my country, not limited to but certainly including those in positions of power, do not value life. We let millions of people die of preventable diseases because we have no interest in creating a safety net which could save lives. We have a culture of political violence that we refuse to address because it is too uncomfortable to fully consider how tenuous of a grasp we have on what we call our democracy. As I write, we are dropping unprovoked bombs halfway across the world while the news media discuss how it may potentially impact Donald Trump’s polling numbers but not how many people have died or will continue to die because of this.
The American cult of death robs millions, domestically and internationally, of the only true asset in the world. Maybe those who believe in a positive afterlife are correct and these deaths, to paraphrase Iowa senator Joni Ernst, aren’t that big of a deal because better things are yet to come. But given that this death disproportionately impacts those that those in charge either dislike or at the very least disregard as lesser than them, it does not seem as though they are working under this assumption. American Christians are notorious for developing a government system that does not adhere to the values espoused by Jesus Christ in the Bible, but an adamant belief that their time on Earth is relatively insignificant in the broader story of the continuing odyssey of their soul makes the selfishness of their politics more coherent. But their behavior suggests that they’re just trying to maximize their own gains during their life on Earth.
The extent to which society has stopped caring about others is disheartening, and it’s the kind of thing that should be easier to avoid in a culture dictated by a belief that good deeds in this life will help one out in the next. I hope I’m wrong about what happens when we die, because it would be comforting to believe that those who have destroyed human life so callously might face repercussions. But I suspect that, just as some day my world will abruptly and permanently end, so will theirs, and that for as much as they will be seen in hindsight as horrible monsters, they will never be forced, even from a different plane of existence, to be forced to hear about it.
