I don’t know when the world became such a broken place. Some people would argue and say it has always been this way, that it is only now we are realizing it, but I don’t agree with this. And I get it. A wheel turns both ways, but why are we choosing to go backwards?
It feels to me as if all of these wars, protests, mass shootings, and political uprisings, and the millions upon millions of lives that have been lost in the last 80 years alone, have been for nothing. We promised each other and we promised ourselves that we were going to change, and look where we are now. People are still dying and being slaughtered, senselessly, for no reason other than being alive.
In 2013, 66.4% of single-bias hate crimes in the U.S targeted people with black skin. 78.6% targeted Jews. Hate groups like the KKK, Neo-Nazi, White Nationalists, General Hate, Christian Identity, etc. still thrive, and not only in the States. Austria, Belgium, France, Czech Republic, Taiwan, Canada, South Africa, Chile, Australia, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and so many others have had numerous accounts of hate crimes and toxic ideology, and in 2014, the terrorism and hate crime rate increased by 80% in just one year.
And it’s two years later now. And it’s 76 years since the end of the Holocaust. And it’s 48 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s 15 years since 9/11. And nothing has changed.
And I get it. People get scared, and most times, people tend to try to kill the thing that scares them, and that is why terrorists are so successful at messing up the world. But we have to stop being afraid of each other. The world is made up of people, and that’s all they are. They’re just people. And I don’t understand what is so hard to understand about that.
People aren’t scary. It’s the weapons that they hold in their hands and the ideas they hold in their heads that are scary. It’s the fact that the whole world is on the edge of their seat, not sure if the next hashtag will be #prayforus. And it makes me want to scream at everybody to stop. To yell, and cry, and explain to them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That a person is a person even if they don’t look like you. That we embraced science fiction before we embraced the human race and maybe it shouldn’t have been done in that order. That if we could all just stop, and slow down, and allow each other the time to catch our breath and to think clearly, maybe we could be okay. And maybe we could make a promise to each other everyone is capable of actually keeping.
References:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33205339
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/hate-crime-america-numbers-n81521
Rotted Apple 