Those familiar with the Bible will recall the story in the Old Testament where Pharoah ordered the slaughter of all male Hebrew children, because he was overwhelmed by the ever-growing population and feared they would overtake his kingdom. This led to the story of Moses, who was cast into the river by his mother and later found by the daughter of Pharoah, who took him home and raised him in the palace under the very nose of the man who feared the loss of his kingdom to the Hebrews.
A similar story appears in the New Testament, where Herod orders the slaughter of all male children under the age of three because he feared the prophecies about the Messiah and was afraid of losing his kingdom to the new King.
I have always been an avid reader and have been fascinated with many of the ancient Greek myths, most of which were based on some historical event, as most stories are, even in our day and age. All good fiction is based on historical truths, after all.
On the surface, contemporary America seems very distant from the world of Greek tragedy or the Toltec capital of Tula in 950 A.D. But our societies have something in common.
We all practice child sacrifice.
The latest young victims of the ritual slaughter our culture permits are the 19 children shot to death inside their school in Uvalde, Texas, last week.
The massacre brings the total number of children killed in school shootings since the 1999 Columbine attack to 185. That figure does not account for all the other settings in which children have been the victims of mass gun violence. And it does not include the 311,000 children who were injured in school shootings, witnessed their classmates and teachers being shot, or sought shelter in barricaded classrooms, bathrooms and closets.
Given the lack of action after these spasms of butchery, there is only one possible conclusion: We are willing to tolerate the murder of children. We accept events that will gravely wound the bodies and psyches of many others.
But in exchange for what? For what Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has called "the fundamental, God-given right each and every one of us has to defend our lives, to defend our homes, to defend our children, to defend our family”? Must we allow the possibility that our children will be destroyed in order that they might, hypothetically, be saved?
At least in other stories and societies, the people who murdered children and the people who sanctioned those murders believed they were giving their children to the gods in return for something vital.
Excavations near Knossos have uncovered the remains of a sacrificed teenager, and historians of the period believe that Minoans may have practiced human sacrifice in response to natural catastrophes, such as floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Archaeologists believe that Toltec and Aztec children were sacrificed to the rain god Tlaloc to ensure the success of the harvest.
As for our contemporary bargain, the Greek tragedian Euripides came closest to capturing its ugliness. In his play “Iphigenia at Aulis," the Greek forces assembled to return Helen from Troy find themselves becalmed by a lack of wind. A seer tells Agamemnon, the Greek war leader, that the only way to get the troops on their way is to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.
Agamemnon sends for Iphigenia under false pretenses - then balks at the enormity of what he has been asked to do. But just when it seems he has recovered his moral sense, he changes his mind, because he does not want to appear weak to the troops he commands.
Agamemnon’s cowardice should be both ghastly and recognizable to anyone familiar with the contemporary offerings of “thoughts and prayers” instead of legislation, of sympathy but not of courage. Just as Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, is horrified by the prospect of “buying what we most detest with what we hold most dear," so is every school shooting a sickening reminder of the choice American society makes over and over again.
Maybe there is one difference between us and these fictional Greeks. Clytemnestra describes children as “what we hold most dear.” But for all American society says about children being valuable - Food and Drug Administration chief Robert M. Califf has called babies “our dearest and most precious people”- we do not really act like it.
The way we choose political expediency over children’s lives in mass shootings may be the most dramatic and sickening kind of human sacrifice we make. But every day, in smaller yet still degrading ways, we let children bear our burdens and the costs of our weaknesses.
Our willingness to sacrifice children and their needs is evident in the infant formula shortage, and in the public and private failures to make sure all babies have access to safe, nutritious food.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, we sacrificed children’s educations and their social development; we may never be able to compensate them for these losses. And by putting the youngest children last in line for Covid-19 vaccines, we have ensured that they will continue to make sacrifices long after many adults have gone about their new normal.
Before she consigned herself to the sacrificial altar, Iphigenia implored her father: “Do not destroy me before my time, for sweet it is to look upon the light.”
Agamemnon did not listen to his daughter.
We still can.
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