I have heard quite a few people asking lately out loud and on social media, "What is going on in the world today?" or "What is our world coming to?" and "How did things get this bad?". It got this bad because no one cares anymore. Yes, people will change their Facebook photo to a French flag after the Paris attacks or they'll post about how sad Sandy Hook made them feel but ten minutes later they'll forget that those things even happened. Americans didn't care about terrorism until after 9/11, or gun control until after Sandy Hook, or election protocol until after Donald Trump was elected.

There were posts on social media sites about how 2016 was the worst year because notable individuals such as Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher, and David Bowie died. I'm not saying that their deaths weren't sad or tragic but for a large portion of the world's population there is a lot more troubling situations going on. 2016 may have been the worst year because every person on Earth still does not have access to clean water, a sustainable amount of food, or shelter. 2016 may have been the worst because there was ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that the news and government were too afraid to call genocide. Yet go onto Facebook and you know what the most talked about topics are? Blackberry has a new keyboard phone, Nicki Minaj broke up with her boyfriend, some kind of record-breaking flash drive was just created. We are too preoccupied with material things to care that there are not equal human rights around the world. One of the most serious situations being ignored by the public is the Syrian Civil War.

Syria made the news in December of 2016 when government forces began devastating bombings on the city of Aleppo and back in 2013 when it was believed that chemical weapons were being used in the war. And of course, unsurprisingly, these stories only stayed at the forefront of the news for a few days before being taken over by a more interesting and newsworthy story. But the truth of the matter is that the Syrian crisis had been going on long before that and the country is literally being ripped apart at the seams but nobody seems to care. Save The Children produced a video that made the point that if the war was taking place in a Western nation, much more attention would be paid to the violence.

The United States will "condemn" what's happening. You'll look up from your phone for five seconds to frown and say how sad, but besides that not much else will be done. It's like Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme." We ignored the Holocaust, we ignored Rwanda, we ignored the Armenian genocide until it was too late and later asked ourselves "How could we stop this from happening again." Well, it's happening again, and once again we are ignoring it. The exact number can't be known but it's believed that around 450,000 have died, including 50,000 children.

There are cities other than Aleppo that have been wiped off the map, such as Homs.

After having said all of this I do need to pay recognition to the countries that are helping. Turkey has given hundreds of millions of dollars organizing refugee camps and is currently housing nearly half of the 6 million refugees. Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt have been housing many of the refugees as well, but the relief effort is horribly underfunded. Less than a billion of the $4 billion needed to support the refugees has been provided. It can't be a handful of countries and the UN, we all need to take part and help in any way we can to save Syria and save the lives of its citizens. And maybe someday this statement will ring true, "Where a person lives in the world should not determine whether they live in the world" ~Bono.