Steven LaChance Blog

Every human life should matter equally, but if we are honest with ourselves, that is not the world we have created.

What unsettles me is that most people already know this is true, but somewhere along the way we trained ourselves to accept it as normal.

A wealthy or famous person is murdered and the story becomes national tragedy. Endless coverage. Special reports. Public mourning. Their photographs are everywhere. Their lives are reconstructed in detail so the world can fully understand exactly who was lost.

Meanwhile, countless others disappear quietly into statistics.

A woman working two jobs.
A runaway teenager.
A migrant.
A sex worker.
A man sleeping in his car.
A child born into the wrong neighborhood.

Sometimes their stories barely make the local news. Sometimes they are reduced to a single sentence. Sometimes they are spoken about as if their circumstances somehow made their deaths less shocking, less tragic, or somehow expected.

That is the part that should horrify us.

Not just the violence itself, but the quiet social agreement underneath it all. The idea that some lives are considered more valuable than others.

Money buys visibility.
Status buys outrage.
Power buys attention.

And the absence of those things too often buys silence.

This is something we need to change in our society because everyone should have value. Everyone should matter.

Do not tell me we are a moral or godly society if we cannot see the worth in every living person.

The true measure of a society is not how it treats the wealthy, the famous, or the powerful. It is how it treats the forgotten, the vulnerable, the struggling, and the people who have nothing to offer in return.

The single mother working two jobs matters.
The addict trying to survive matters.
The homeless man matters.
The immigrant matters.
The sex worker matters.
The abandoned child matters.

All human beings carry the same breath of life. Grief does not care about class. The mother crying over her murdered son in a trailer park feels the same devastation as the family mourning someone in a mansion.

Pain is democratic even when coverage is not.

And if we only grieve loudly for the people with status while the rest disappear quietly into statistics and back pages, then something inside our culture is deeply broken.