That familiar communal experience of tuning into the nightly news, never failing to revel in its documentation of the end of human lives, shows more from the reaction it garners than from the actual content. Just like in the movies, we (the audience) glorify murder when it’s done to “bad guys” and unify in grief when the “good guys” are victimized. But the cultural relativism at the forefront of our attitude toward such action reveals an ethical black hole in America.

There is a growing establishment orthodoxy that aims to affix the value of a non-American life at less than one. Even more repugnant is the devaluing of those American lives that fall outside the penumbra of respectability, painted by the rough brush of racism, classism and “them”-ism.

I don’t need to write this. After all, by riding the waves of white privilege as they crash upon the beaches where I vacation, I know I could never be explicitly targeted. I could never be collateral damage. I can don a hoodie and walk down the street at night, but I will never be Trayvon Martin — perceived as a threat by my neighbors. I am a military-age male, but I will never be Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki — perceived as a threat by my government. Nobody will ever think I’m up to no good or view me as guilty until proven innocent because American exceptionalism and societal advantage — the byproducts of a moral pedigree that views me as a “good guy” — have my back.

The classrooms at Sandy Hook and the movie theaters in Aurora have been visited by the vapidity of human evil, but so have the playgrounds of Chicago and the markets of Waziristan, the alleys in Compton and the city squares of Baghdad. The disparity in our responses, however, is stark.

Cultural relativism denies intrinsic rights and wrongs. Instead, it decides on the merits of worth, establishing instrumental and arbitrary pedestals that undeniably have been raised from a history less than praiseworthy.

President Barack Obama may say that if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon,” but until we reject superficiality and the essence of one’s background, hundreds of black men and brown women and Arab children will never be viewed as someone’s son or daughter or — perhaps the greater standard — as our own son or daughter. They will be viewed not through the prism of empathy but as merely expendable.

We feed into the absolute language of black and white pseudo-reality, allowing us to determine blunt finality for others because it’s not like they fit our profile. In the Middle East, after all, they are faceless and invisible. Those people are “bad guys.” Their deaths don’t come with teddy bears and flowers and obituaries. That they are a casualty of the Global War on Terror is the cruelest of ironies.

In our streets, we are meant to fear. Pulling the trigger à la George Zimmerman is always self-defense because we’ve been conditioned to think of minority communities as “them,” not “us.”

This difference in attitude is not some innocuous triviality. Rather, it is a pernicious way to strip others of their humanity and dilute our values, reducing basic human rights to mere privileges.

This is our national security policy abroad. Yes, 5-year-olds may die from cruise missiles, but the important thing is that they aren’t our 5-year-olds. They are over there, not here. It’s either kill or be killed.

This is our gun policy at home. After the Sandy Hook massacre, National Rifle Association CEO and Executive Vice President Wayne Lapierre infamously said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  Lapierre’s statements are a prime example of when the mere invocation of the good/bad phraseology becomes enough to mobilize others in the “good” fight.

As Esquire’s Tom Junod writes, both government officials and the NRA use a “pervasive sense of existential threat that justifies a status quo stained with the occasional bloodshed of innocents.” But this bloodshed can’t truly be justified. The victims are just as innocent as you and I. We accept their deaths as a necessary evil, part of the culture or some other excuse that is noticeably absent of any emotional resonance

Tragedies don’t happen to Kimani Grays or Hadiya Pendletons or Tariq Khans. But are their lives less than mine simply because I don’t look like them or wasn’t born in country X?

There’s no denouement to the degradation of our principles when we continuously assign an arbitrary definition to who is “good” and who is “bad.” We simply declare actions to be barbarism in some cases, while we uphold them as virtue or self-defense under different circumstances.

Nuance is not to be avoided; it is to be embraced. Just because there is evil in the world doesn’t mean we need to assign labels and simplify it. We can combat it by holding true to a commitment to preserve life. For you, me and everyone else, and not by the method of cultural relativism.

Newtown, you are not alone. But thanks to our acceptance of “them”-ism, a slew of other communities here and abroad are.

Chris DiNardo is former opinion editor. Email him at [email protected].