Over the past several days, I’ve had pounded into my head over all forms of social media the gruesome and incredibly disturbing images and videos of death. Deaths of black civilians, deaths of white civilians, deaths of police officers. Deaths of human beings.
Not only are we becoming desensitized to these images of blood and gore to the point when these videos are accepted by social media platforms, but they are almost expected. And we can’t stop watching. Even worse than that, people took out their phones in these moments to record them or even to live stream them. I don’t know about you, but if I saw someone’s life end in person... I wouldn’t be able to hold myself together, let alone hold a phone steady.
At the same time, we must acknowledge that this desensitization is out of necessity. The things going on today have been going on for ages, but media has provided a method for us to make the events visible and noticed. Despite this, those who need to hear the stories never seem to think anyone else speaking truthfully or look for any flaw to discredit their words. Even presented evidence is taken with much more than a grain of salt. It’s more like an ocean of salt.
But now, after days of what feels to me to be some of the worst for this country’s people that I’ve witnessed, I feel mentally paralyzed. I walked around my house in a daze for hours not knowing how to articulate my thoughts and emotions either with others or in my journal.
And so I am here. I am not ready to move on from the events of last week, as no one with any common sense or value in humanity should be. All I can say is that this week — this month — this year — this era has been a devastating one for human kind. We apparently value lives so little that we see violence and condemnation of one another as the only solutions to the intrinsic issues in our society, no matter which side of those issues you find yourself on. We have failed to dig deeper and to ask ourselves the hard questions, ask why we do the things we do in the manners we choose, analyze our own motives and biases, assess why and how we can and should better ourselves, and then take action.
No matter the amount of frustration or anger anyone may feel with another person or demographic, we must remember to ask why. We must be willing to open our minds to the experiences of one another in order to understand. We must also remember that we cannot force another to understand.
We can go back in time. Look at history. Look at where things started and see how things have grown from those beginnings. Follow it forwards, follow it backwards. Trace it to the root, to the source and realize why that matters.
It matters because history repeats itself. No matter how much we believe times have changed and people are more evolved than the first examples of homo sapiens, we should not be fooled by ourselves. We have retained the same basic thought processes since then. It may have grown in complexity and we may have developed a language that seems to really have only complicated things further, but our thoughts, at their most fundamental level, are the same.
They will be that way for years to come.
What has changed and will continue to change are the implications of those thought processes. How we allow our thoughts to manifest into words and words into actions. Actions into habits. Habits into character. Character into destiny.
Let’s determine our destiny.
