We’ve all seen the news. We’ve read the articles. At least to some extent, most of us know what happened in Orlando. Fortunately, most of us will never understand the fear and sadness that the victims and their families felt and will continue to feel in the aftermath of this event. If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering how something like this can be real. It’s so far removed from my life it’s hard to imagine that somewhere, people are actually in the middle of it, experiencing it for real.
Very shortly after this tragic event, news anchors, celebrities, politicians, and civilians alike all began to comment on what happened from all sides. Sometimes it was a message to victims and their families showing support. Sometimes it was the exact opposite. Sometimes it was a politician trying to tell all of us what they will do to prevent something like this from happening again, and sometimes it was a person blaming a group for its occurring at all. I’m not here to tell anyone that their response was wrong or invalid. My only question is where’s the compassion? I’d love to think that humans are inherently compassionate, but I sometimes question how that could be possible when terribly awful events like this are used to give someone a leg up in whatever they’re trying to achieve, whether that be social status or politics.
A friend of mine, while discussing the shooting, commented on the effect the news can have on events like this. She felt that a great deal of the destruction and devastation that comes is caused by the intense social media coverage that events like this receive. News stations rehash the story over and over, bringing in theorists to hypothesize detrimental conclusions and end up providing no one with the facts like they should because simply being transparent and honest without picking sides won’t win them the best ratings or the highest number of viewers. Why is that what’s important here? Why is it more important to fire people up and have them glued to your television than to be a catalyst encouraging humans to come together and provide the support that’s necessary for those in need? Why do we need to manipulate human emotion for a social or political agenda?
The world needs more compassion. I think this world needs more people who are willing to take the attention away from the awful things that we all see happen and show everyone that there’s still good in the world. We can’t prevent the terrible things from happening every time. What we can do is appreciate when someone chooses to love, compassion, joy, or empathy. We can show each other those things and so much more. We can choose to come together and be united or we can focus on why we aren’t. It’s easy to choose hate. It’s easy to point fingers, blame others, talk about the horrible things in this world as if they are scenes from a movie that we’re mad the writer thought it was okay to write it into the script. It’s harder to look past all of that and realize that we’re all here together. So the next time you want to choose hate or anger, remember that we are all together in this big game of life and that in this life the most important thing that we’ll have is each other.
