In today’s world it seems that every time you turn on the television or open your phone then you are almost guaranteed to be confronted with a new tragedy. Someone, somewhere, has committed some horrible crime or another life has inevitably been taken; and someone, somewhere, is in a great deal of pain for it. We live in a world where we constantly fear for our husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, daughters, and sons. Yet somehow, in this fearful world, we have lost all of our compassion.
Constantly, I see posts on social media with people stating their opinion on who they thought was in the right or who they thought was in the wrong, or why or why not someone deserved the horrible thing that happened to them. We have divided ourselves by opinion via social media. In the blame game, no one really wins. We are creating wars with our fellow human beings by taking sides with weapons fashioned from status updates and tweets. We are so busy defending or accusing that we are losing sight of the most obvious tragedy there is in all this, human lives have been lost by the hands of other human beings. People that were loved and cared for by other human beings are now gone and no amount of angry typing is going undo it.
Let’s take all factors out of the most recent tragedies and look at the raw side of things. In the Orlando shootings, 50 human lives were lost. In Dallas, five human lives were taken. And in just the first half of this year, over 500 human lives have been lost in cases like the recent Alton Sterling case. These people had families, they were people's children, and they were people’s parents. It’s wrong. It’s all wrong, and we all should be doing everything we can to stop this from happening but instead people are choosing an extreme of an argument and blaring their opinion.
Guess what? You can still grieve for lives police lost in Dallas and at the same time want police in general to be held to standards of not killing people. You can hold compassion and understanding for more than one ‘side’ of an argument. People are dying when there’s no reason for it. If at the end of the day we can all can only agree on one thing, can’t it be that? For heaven’s sake can’t we just unite so things like this quit occurring? Is there no compromise? We have lost compassion and understanding. We are not treating each other fairly. We have blinded each other with delusions of superiority. Every single person is guilty of it rather directly or indirectly and the people who feel these effects most are usually black, gay or female. Just because you don’t bluntly feel the outcome doesn’t mean the injustice is not there. Is there no possibility of us listening to each other with intent to understand instead of intent to reply? Maybe if we truly stepped into another person’s shoes and opened our minds a bit and closed our mouths a lot then we could start to make forward progress.
We live in a world where we fear for ourselves and those we love. We spend time hoping and praying that it will end and that there will be a day where we no longer have to have arguments like this. Let’s start listening to each other, understanding each other, and let us love each other in spite of our differences, because when the sun sets the only thing dividing our country is ourselves. Taking sides is the only thing standing in the way of us uniting. Every single person should be working towards the goal of ending injustice. Every single person should be working toward the goal of having no deaths due to hate. Every single person should be working towards the goal of a world where regardless of race, religion, or gender anyone can walk down the street safely. And most importantly, we should just stop freaking killing each other.
When will we stop playing the blame game? When will we stop sitting behind the safety of a computer screen and choosing a standpoint? People are still dead, people are still being treated immorally, and violence keeps striking and hurting. Yes, by all means be angry. But please don’t be angry because you thought someone was right or someone was wrong, but because a life was lost and nothing is going to change that. Rather it be black, white, gay, straight, democrat or republican, every single human life is important. Every single human matters to someone and it’s about time we as a society start acting like it.
