I need everyone, for just a few minutes, to cut ties with their political affiliation and listen.
Tragedies are occurring every single day in the United States of America and around the globe.
Every single day.
And we should all care because human life is being lost and tread upon like dirt.
When something like what happened in Charlottesville becomes a reality, our first instinct should not be defensiveness. Someone drove a car into a crowd.
Again.
Someone died because of someone else's own hatefulness.
Again.
There is not another culprit. It was hatefulness. That's where murder comes from.
And I cannot understand why this country once again has turned its cheek from simply mourning for the hatefulness and loss of life to fight each other on who is right about something that has no justification, something that should never have happened.
Events like these should bring this country together.
We should hold each other, cry together, comfort each other. Have conversations that shed light. Empathize. Listen.
Instead? Everybody just fights. And there is a good fight, mind you. I want to fight it.
I'm trying to be in it. I'm not happy with the world either. We should all be fighting it. I'm not saying we should be silent at a time like this, because this world isn't ready for silence, and I'm not sure it ever will be.
Not when such hatred and darkness, racism, phobia, inequality exist. But I don't know how to appeal to people who just won't listen anymore to what that fight is. Care to know?
That fight is love.
The good fight is LOVE.
The father of Heather Heyer, the young woman who was killed in Charlottesville this past weekend, spoke words of loving-kindness and forgiveness at her memorial, saying that "we just need to stop all this stuff and forgive each other... just stop, just love one another."
Don't we get it? We are not each other's enemies.
The Enemy is hatred, hatefulness.
The Enemy is this darkness, this pestilence of bigotry and ideologies that justify destroying life. The Enemy is the soul-shattering lack of love that we are existing in, at this very moment.
I suppose the world doesn't have a very good definition of love right now, or people just don't care. I see things every day that scream to me that people just don't care about love. People don't care about coming to the aid of others.
People don't care about the sacredness of humanity or moving towards a compassionate world. Some people don't even seem to care that a woman was killed in Charlottesville, but only about how their views align with the protest, or about what their News station is commenting on the event, or who is to blame.
Let me set one thing straight— nobody leaves their house asking to be the victim of an act of domestic terrorism.
Do not defend a mindset that propels hatred so violently and selfishly into the world.
And now, something somewhat similar has occurred again in Barcelona, and the world is sickened.
Our hearts, as they should, go out to those in Barcelona, as before for those in Brussels, and London, and Paris.
The list goes on.
But it's as if that same condemnation of hatred and violence hits a brick wall when an event like that occurs within our own borders, carried out by someone who is of European descent instead of Middle Eastern.
Instead, it becomes an argument about Constitutional rights (which are very important, yes), but that's not the problem. Constitutional rights are meant to protect our ability to be free, not our hatefulness and aggressions towards others of humankind.
And I know this country has seen a lot. I know there is a lot of hurt. History has given us a reason to be afraid. But the criminalization of very specific skin tones and faith systems is relentlessly destroying both this country and our ability to love.
Some people here in the U.S. look abroad and seem to say "what a mess," but the sickness of this country screams that we are a giant heaping mess! People are dying every day; humans being killed at the hands of other humans, here.
At the hands of guns, at the hands of bloodthirsty drivers, at the hands of homegrown bombs, at the hands of a fatal kind of poverty.
The reason many people are so upset about how things have been handled is because the President of the United States, along with a good amount of the rest of those holding office, does not understand, care about, or move towards addressing actual very real and hateful problems.
I'm not even sure that Donald Trump understands what racism is. It's not just slurs and treatment of people, it's a system. And we need to listen to each other, and to educate each other on the actual history of our country.
We have a President that doesn't understand the deep past of his own nation, who doesn't understand the people, who doesn't understand compassion. And throughout our recent history, the War on Terrorism has become the War on Muslims, and the War on Drugs has become the War on Blacks and Mexicans.
People have come to pick and choose where they aim the barrel of their righteous gun, aiming at targets that have been systemically oppressed.
I don't know how to make white supremacists see their erred ways. I don't know how to make people stop killing each other. I don't know how to drive hate out of others' hearts. I don't know how to teach people to empathize.
One step is education about what the world is really like.
One step is listening.
The largest step is loving.
In a world so hell-bent and obsessed with love, it's like this planet doesn't even know what that four-letter word means.
So maybe we should learn. Before you make a tragedy all about you and your own petty offense, look to where your love should be.
So if we're going to fight, let's be sure we're fighting the right fight.
