Like I'm sure many of you are doing, I am wondering when the worth of a human life became a question. Also like many of you, I am sick. I'm sick of the death, the hate, the violence and sick of the protest, sick of seeing the #livesmatter. It is truly disgusting. What once was one nation united under God is now a broken, lost, hate-filled and heartbroken people. I can not begin to fathom or understand the recent events that have gone on in this country.

I debated writing this article for a few weeks. I had decided I wasn't going to write it. I was just going to stay out of it and be quiet. I didn't want to risk hurting anyone's feelings, or sparking a fire in anyone. The more and more I thought about it, I just couldn't stay quiet. I have been given a voice and the power to use it. Odyssey has been a great opportunity for me and I will not waste my chance to use my voice. I realized people can only take what you let them have, and I refuse to lose my freedom of speech to fear. Martin Luther King once said, "Our lives begin to end the day we get silent about the things that matter." Lives matter and I wont be silent.

I am ashamed to live in a world so corrupt with hatred for one another. I have no answers and I have no instant solutions, but I have the platform to use my voice and I have the heart and passion to hopefully spark a light of love in some of your hearts.

While my heart goes out to the many innocents that lost their lives, and I cannot begin to imagine what their friends and families are experiencing; I do not want to rant about the wrongdoings of the past. I want to change the future. I want to invoke a passion to love and care. I want to change at least one person's way of thinking. I have the power to try to change and although it may not be a huge impact on tons of people, it still matters. "Rome wasn't built in a day," and I can't change the world-- not in a day, at least.

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy fix, or a universal solution. The only answers I have to the problems America is facing today involve compassion. The acts that have gone on in this country are horrific and inexcusable, so how do we change them? We desegregate ourselves and quit blaming every race but our own for the tragedy. We quit playing the victim to crimes that did not even affect us. In the midst of "standing together" and hashtagging for the lives lost, we've only helped the evil widen the divide in this country. #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, #gaylivesmatter are great because their lives do matter, but we have segregated ourselves, placed ourselves above others because of the hate in someone else's heart, and now become an even easier target. We are so focused on fighting for our individual groups that we are forgetting to fight for each other too.

Men and women of all races are overseas fighting, and dying, protecting this country so that we don't have to. All of the fighting in America and the divide between the people discredits everything the soldiers are doing overseas to protect us at home. Why are we taking men and women away from their homes and families to go fight just so we can fight at home? It's absurd and it has to stop.

I truly believe that every life matters, from the homeless man's on the street begging for money, to the person bagging my groceries, to the richest persons in America, and to the mentally handicap that can't do anything for themselves. They all matter. We are free from a caste system that so many were oppressed by, so let's not voluntarily place ourselves into one. We are free and it's time to act like it, because all lives matter.