#Justise4All No. 14

⟦On Brussels⟧

Waking up to the news in Belgium this week reminded me of just how insensitive, socially unresponsive, and poorly reported these incidents are. All these "journalists," TV personalities, and politicians...they don't give a damn about the several dozen dead, or the injured. They care about saying something to keep their job and keep them popular with their circle of attention. They care about making sure that you have an emotional response to their nonsense. They care about themselves, and the people to whom they must answer. And you eat it up. You get mad, you get upset, you get scared, all the things that should be secondary to using the two things that can help prevent future incidents like this: your heart and your brain.

With due respect to those who lost their lives in this act of violence, how many people die every day through similar violent acts, and we either don't know about it, or choose not to care? How many people this week committed suicide, or lost their lives due to complications from AIDS, or become victims of rape and sexual assault? All things that each of us can help alleviate or prevent in the simplest ways, many of those ways involving just being kind to people and thinking before we act. But no, we instead wait for the sensationalist theatrics of an admittedly unconscionable crime against humanity to remember just how human we really are. We want the spectacle of death to give us a nudge on the shoulder and force us to re-examine what it is our lives are about, instead of being thankful everyday for the life that we have and using it to make someone else's life better.

I want nothing more in this world then for people to live in peace. I want nothing more than for justice to be done for people who are constantly being robbed of it. I want nothing more than for people to be free. But as long as we are imprisoned by this morbid addiction to death and violence, then death and violence are all we can expect from people who have nothing left to live for. What else besides desperation leads people to think that constant violence and bloodshed will bring them the answers, long-term ones, to satisfy their desires? What else besides the hope for something better in death or perpetuating it would anyone want to take the life of another? And what is it going to take for us to realize just how wrong that actually is?

When you look at the news today, or read your local paper, and they talk about places like Belgium, or Istanbul, or Pakistan, or the ravaged war-torn places of the world like Africa, always remember that you have the potential to be a critical thinker, and that you have the opportunity, as someone who is not directly experiencing these tragic events, to find out just how and why they happen. Pray for the dead, that should go without saying. But it is time that we as a human family stop waiting for tragedy to inspire us to be better people. It shouldn't be a tragic event that spurs us to action to love one another and help each other get free. Your opportunity to stop people from becoming desperate and willing to rob other people of their dignity, their humanity, and their lives, starts right now. Seize that opportunity. Be kind. Think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. Do the research before you condemn anyone. And most importantly, never forget that at the forefront of what so many people are struggling for when it comes to topics like justice and liberation, is love.