Priceless

By Lorena Aviles (Park City, IL)

“How much are humans worth? Give me a monetary answer,” asked Binyamin Appelbaum.

Absolutely priceless, I thought.

I have lived my entire life believing that a human life cannot be valued in terms of money or in terms of anything other than what it is: life. But on Tuesday, Appelbaum, a journalist for the New York Times, gave a presentation where he claimed that in the eyes of the government, each human life is worth $9.1 million. After hearing the “right” answer, I was very skeptical. What right does the government have to decide the value of life? It is an entity with the power to make laws, but not with the power to end lives.

In my opinion, every single life is worth preserving. No individual is worth more than another. It does not matter if the person is a criminal, a savior, or the person who cured cancer; all human life is priceless and must remain so.

Even though life is an incredible absurdity, life is priceless.