Maybe we’re not so tough.

Nobody knows how many people died in the 20th century as a result of human violence. Estimates vary according to how you define violence. Do you count the 20 or so million who died of starvation in Russian in the 1930s because of government policy, or the 50 or so million who starved in China in the 1950s because of government policy? How about the unknown millions who died because of coal dust in the air around early industrial centers?

Whatever method of counting you use, you wind up with a number in the low 9-figure range. For the sake of discussion here, we’ll settle on a nice even number in the mid-range of the various estimates, and say that in the 20th century, we killed 200,000,000 people.

Yet here I sit, calmly writing this in the brave new wired and wireless world, and there you sit quietly reading this in that same world of technological wonders. What do those 200,000,000 decayed and decaying bodies have to do with us? The century is gone, over, finished, finis. We're done with that book, we read the last page, closed the cover, and started over on a nice clean page 1.

I think not.

Because, paraphrasing Jesus: the dead we shall always have with us—especially those who are dead by our own hand. Whether we know it or now, whether we are conscious of them or not.

Some religions, of course, acknowledge this reality through various ritual remembrances. Others get around the problem by asserting that, well, the dead may be dead but, um, you see, they’re not really dead.