The world, the world is ending,
Watch the sky
Fall on us
The world, the world is ending
We'll run away
Together
-- World is Ending by Matt and Kim
To the date when this article was written, there have been 179 cases of gun violence that resulted in injury, death, or both just in the past year. Just yesterday in Dallas, five were killed and nine injured. A few weeks ago in Orlando, fifty died. Eight died in Piketon, Ohio back in April; fourteen were injured in Hesston, Kansas in February; six died in Kalamazoo, Michigan in February; another six died in Chesapeake, Virginia in January.
What on earth is happening? Or, to be melodramatic: Is the world ending?
Well, I certainly hope not. But what is happening to the world is something that none of us should take lightly. And this is not to say that we have done our part just by understanding the seriousness of all the events that have transpired in the past year. Time should have proven to us at this point that travesties of this scale at this frequency demand our attention and reaction. Civilization is tearing itself apart because of differences that we as a whole aren’t willing to resolve or overlook for the greater good.
Being correct makes us feel good, so much that the desire to be correct can easily cloud the line between opinion and fact, so much that compromise is considered vulgar, so much that we cannot differentiate reconciliation and compromise. Compromise, because to almost everyone who isn’t you, you are misguided in your belief system in one way or another. Only with compromise can there be reconciliation, and reconciliation is the only pathway by which there can be open conversation and understanding, potentially even agreement. Do you realize how rare agreement is now in this day and age? We only ever “agree to disagree” now.
Moral absolutes are imposed on others as a gauge to measure desirability, and political correctness went from a courtesy to a phrase to say before acting like a bigot. Like it or not, morality is subjective, and it gets dangerous when a large enough group of people have bearings on their moral compass similar enough and extreme enough for them to act violently or applaud violent behavior. We need to stop pointing fingers about what happened and decide to accept the fact that there is only a small group of people screwing things up for everyone. They are succeeding, because for some reason I cannot fathom, traits or belief systems that violent people share with people who just want to be left alone are construed as undesirable and somehow causal to violent behavior.
In all these little ways, we are contributing to the issue at hand. We are all part of the problem. Race, gender, sexual orientation, occupation— none of it matters. As long as we maintain the attitude we have towards the people around us, nothing will ever change for the better. There has to exist a sense of urgency for change that begins with our attitudes towards how we approach conversation regarding hot topic issues like mass shootings and police brutality. I know political differences are almost impossible to resolve, but on issues that affect lives, there has to exist an environment that encourages communication, understanding, and yes, COMPROMISE. Are the recent events not traumatizing enough for us to take a change in attitude? Or are they just not personal enough for us to care?
