Saturday, November 28, 2015

World Gone Wild

Yesterday, a lone gunman killed three unsuspecting people, including a veteran police officer, at a Colorado Planned Parenthood.

Two weeks ago, Paris was the site of a series of terror attacks that killed 129 civilians.

On Thursday, Chicago PD released a video of the shooting death 17-year old Laquan McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke, which led to protests along Chicago's "Magnificent Mile" on Black Friday.

Violence, it seems, is the universal solution for addressing personal grievances (real or imagined), economic or social oppression, political differences, religious divisions, marital discord, and racial animosities.

One would have hoped that 15 years into the new millennium, we might have evolved to be more tolerant of differences (diversity) and less wedded to our prejudices and hatreds.

We are all guilty of adding to the violence pot. We all have reasons to hate. We all harbor anger toward some "Others."

In our personal lives, we find it hard to forgive, much less forget.

The bombers, the shooters, and the terrorists just take their anger to extremes.

I don't have a big solution, but I think breaking the chain of violence begins with each of us scaling back hateful rhetoric, revenge talk (even jokingly), and racial stereotyping.

Sound Utopian?

Probably, yet the alternative is to live in a world where we are more and more afraid of going to the movies, dropping our kids off at school, worshiping in church, or enjoying a music concert.

The option: continuing along the path of violence until we destroy ourselves and our planet?






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