There is a world that waits for you, I promise. It is so much greater than you could imagine. It is full of adventure and love. This world begins when compassion pours into our words and fingers are no longer pointed at one another in disgust. When tragedy unites us, rather than tears us apart. This world begins when we remember that a human is a human is a human…
Cut us all open and we are the same, same hearts, same lungs, same brains, we bleed the same color and we hurt the same way. But we forget, too often, that cruelty isn't a punch line and anger isn't a good enough reason to hurt another. We forget that fear is universal and the longing for something better is shared with every person you pass on the street.
The loss of human life is tragedy, it is devastating that our world is full of so much hate that we are unable to escape the news stories and social media posts and tributes about those who unjustly lost the right to breathe, to laugh, to exist. But, it is not our job to point fingers, to speak from the confines of our living room what should have happened, what we would have done in these situations. Rather, it is our job to pursue what we believe is right, to make changes looking to the future while remembering the past.
It becomes too easy behind computer screens to hate those whose opinions differ from ours. To scroll through Facebook newsfeeds with friends deeming liberals as dumb or conservatives as incompetent, making overarching rants about Republicans and Democrats, Police, Black Lives Matter-everyone believes that their point of view is correct. It seems as though no one wants to hear the other side. No one dares hear more than a 15 second soundbite from a debate, to listen to someone who has another candidate in mind, to listen to someone else's experience that we may never have had the misfortune of encountering, in that case, opinions might be changed.
I believe that the world that we live in today isn’t the world that any of us want to inhabit. Hearing people discuss future presidential candidates as the “lesser of evils” or discussing crime as if it is the weather is disappointing beyond measure. We have become a culture of people who are so used to evil, we have become numb. I still believe that a better world waits for us, but it only comes with compassion. Not compassion for one side of humanity, or one religion or race, but for everyone. The devastating events that occur in our world every single day involve people who are more than news interviews and statistics. If we bleed the same and hurt the same and mourn the same, why is it so difficult to see that the world can only change at the hands of those willing to hold the hands of those who are different from themselves.
