I cannot remember when I first started to learn about the Holocaust. It was a lesson that expanded each year when the education system thought my catholic -school -girl mind could handle more. I could understand the reasoning; to learn more when I was more mature, more intelligent, when I could fully comprehend. The truth is, I still can't. I don't think I will ever be able to fully comprehend the evil that flowed through the veins of my ancestors, of members of the human race. I would sit in class thanking God for never letting something so horrific happen in my life time.

We learned about the Trail of Tears first, forcing the Native Americans to abandon homes, then American slavery, then the catholic crusades tearing through the middle ages and my sixth grade class, then the Holocaust, then the genocides of the starving people in Russia, then then then then. We learned about brutal tyrants and cold blooded followers, we learned about right and wrong and radical religious zealots, and patriotism and dying countries.

All this learning and I could never come to a conclusion. So many notebooks filled with the crimes against humanity and what we attribute these monstrous acts to. And we will always have another then and another and. We will always learn about more.

Is it because of gun control or religion? Or what about mental illness or patriotism? We try and justify acts we do not understand because that is how we cope, but these acts can never be justified. There is no coping. How can you kill for a religion, when that religion preaches nothing but peace and love? Are these just excuses for primal violence to be exercised? Because if it's for a religion, it can somehow be justified?

I hate that we live in a world I once feared only through the pages of a history book. I would come home everyday with such naive hope that the human race has evolved. Only to be proven wrong time and time again. I was in first grade when 9/11 unraveled our world, but I was too young to understand what really was happening. The human race was devolving, extremists killing for some kind of religion; one that I have never heard of or seen. They started taking the lives of the children in my generation, their parents, and grandparents.

I used to wish the books I read were a reality when I was a child. Always wishing I could cast spells with Harry Potter or have magical powers like Matilda, if only then I could have known what I was wishing for.

If only they told us what to prepare for in my little catholic school, maybe then I could understand. Instead of thanking God I was not a Jewish girl growing up in Germany in the 1940s, I could prepare for what was bound to happen to my generation. You don't need to be anything to die from an terrorist attack. The bombs they detonate and the guns they fire do not discriminate on race, color, religion, or sexuality.

Do not make the mistake of attributing the brutality we see from these radical zealots to the Muslim religion. Do not persecute those who worship for peace because you need something to blame. Do not fuel the fire and contribute to the terrorism's purpose.

What is happening to our world has no religion.