The hardest piece of news to come out of Nice for me, was the story of an eyewitness describing a baby’s body with its head crushed by the truck. What sort of a monster does this? How can this baby’s parents (if they survived) endure this pain?
And for all parents all over the world – regardless of country, race or religion – facing similar horrors, none should ever be put in a position to endure this agony. It’s just too awful for words.
And who won in Nice? The Far Right, led by Le Pen, that’s who. And the Far Right is rising everywhere. That should concern all of us greatly. Of course ISIS (Daesh) claimed it, but this claim isn’t stacking up, even if the French President is jumping on the radicalization bandwagon now. He must. His government is at risk. Please read this great piece featured in the New Yorker this weekend – What We Know About the Attacker in Nice.
No doubt we can’t seem to cope with lone wolfs or nutters. You can’t do anything about them. You can’t predict them. It’s adding a whole new dimension to our current time of crisis.
There is no question in my mind that our world is in chaos and the politics of division and hatred are tearing us apart. We’re all enduring Trump, but did any of us see Brexit coming? Australia elected Pauline Hanson (a pathetic racist), and there are many other unstable political situations around the world demonstrating one thing. Fear is winning.
And then the bombs go off. In Istanbul, in Iraq, or the terrible, graphic massacre in Bangladesh. We mourned the victims of the Orlando shooting by a person who appears to be a confused homophobe, and couldn’t believe it when a monster set off bombs in Saudi Arabia at its most holy place, during its most holy time! Cops kill black men in America and then cops get killed by a black man in return. Turkey is just overcoming a military coup where too many civilians died.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Horrible people are committing horrible crimes, and they are winning. Fear is winning. It’s awful. Hope feels a long way away and I have always believed in the best of people, always.
The vast majority of people are essentially good – no matter where they are from, what religion they follow, or who they love – but there are monsters amongst us. A small handful of bastards who want to drive the world into chaos and drive us apart. And they are winning.
We all talk about the threat of ISIS or Daesh and more often than not, they are just claiming involvement. And we lap it up. We believe the media – especially if a Muslim was involved. Only Muslim’s commit terrorism, didn’t you know? Bollocks!
And yet fear is a lucrative business. Money, oil, drugs, weapons…. There are many people getting very wealthy while we all cower in fear behind what, safe walls. Really? There haven’t been safe walls since weapons capable of travelling thousands of miles were invented, let alone nuclear weapons.
But it’s not just weapons for foreign wars
“Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30 billion and $40 billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other first responders.”
Look at the police uniforms. Is this really necessary? Are we accepting a police state as normal? And who is benefitting here? The weapons manufacturers? You betcha they are!
I believe we’re teetering very close to war and in war, it is always the little man who dies. The voting public who listen to the media and are influenced by ignorant thinking are always the ones destined for the front line (or their children or grandchildren if they are too old). This demographic is always the cannon fodder of war. They will passionately support war and they will die. It’s how it goes.
We often look back at history and wonder how the hell did it happen? How did the Nazi’s get an entire country behind it’s horrific extermination of the Jews? How did the Rwandan genocide happen, where one-day, people woke up and hacked their neighbours to death?
It was a slow and insidious process that’s how. It happens step-by-step. Fear-by-fear. That’s how it succeeds. Slowly, the consciousness of the people is filled with this frightening “otherness” and then everything explodes.
Can we not see that we are heading in the same direction? Could you see yourself hacking to death the lovely Muslim family living down your road right now? Don’t think you’re capable of it? We have thousands of years of history to show that we are all capable of it.
We just need to be a fed a reason and there is none more powerful than the idea of ensuring the safety and survival of one’s family.
Afterwards, we’ll cower in shame and guilt that it happened in our country. We’ll lick our wounds, pull our country back together, and eventually, heal as nations. A new “Anne Frank” book will be published and consumed for generations, all trying to learn the lesson. But do we ever really heal from atrocity? Do we ever really learn the lesson? Unfortunately, I don’t think so.
I am definitely concerned we are teetering towards WWIII. The first two wars started somewhere far away too, and before we knew it, the whole world was engulfed – in separateness and the full ugliness of humanity turned against each other.
We turned a blind eye in the build-up then, are we turning a blind eye now?
Let’s look at the refugee’s crisis. Babies are drowning, freezing, being sold into slavery and these future slaves will know nothing else, because their parents are long-dead and cruel people are seizing on this opportunity to snatch innocent lives away. I believe we need to feel more outraged as a human species about this. We have to stop the ‘closed doors’ thinking. It is this thinking that keeps feeding the enormous problem we are facing.
Why can’t we see that?
Because let’s face it, while dealing with one of the worst refugee crisis in living memory right now, wait until the environmental refugees start pouring across borders. And it’s coming. Record temperatures in the Middle East and New York City predicted to be un-liveable by 2080. Bangladesh is basically doomed, and what are we doing to prepare for the mass of humanity that seeks shelter then?
We are trying to get the most at risk countries prepared, but we need to prepare for environmental refugees too. Not later, when they’re drowning in the oceans or freezing to death while crossing Europe during winter.
It’s coming. Winter really is coming.
We continue to turn our backs on fellow humans in need, because that’s not our fault. Well I’m sorry, when we vote in the politicians who decide to go to war and then afterwards, face the fall-out of that decision, don’t you think it is our fault? I do. Isn’t that democracy?
We are at a point in time where we need to say ENOUGH!! The world is more connected, more immediate, more global AND more compassionate than it has ever been. Everything is changing at a phenomenal pace too – read this article about the speed of change – don’t underestimate its impact please! – and we must brace ourselves. The Industrial Revolution took 80 years, the Digital Revolution will take 20 years, if that.
These changes mean jobs lost, industries destroyed, political instability, educational revolution, rising inequality, and more. But it’s not happening over three generations. It’s one generation. That’s why this time is so hard. It’s brutal because we can’t adapt fast enough.
But we’re approaching it the wrong way. Dividing isn’t going to help us. “Us” and “them” doesn’t exist. We’re all one people today. So we need to open our hearts and minds, and help everyone through this time.
So I suppose we have to ask ourselves this
Is what we are facing the natural evolution of our planet and our species? Is heading towards more chaos and war what we need to move forward? I mean we’ve certainly always moved forward afterwars right? Slowly but surely we get there yes?
Or is it time to recognise the puppet masters – the tiny percentage some call the ruling elite, the illuminati or the New World Order (aka the politicians, religious leaders, media barons and business leaders) – who are manipulating and controlling us all, by keeping our eyes focused at the lowest level, where we hate our differentneighbour, believe what we’re told, elect pathetic politicians and forget to pay attention to what is really happening here. Power, greed, and trillions of dollars being made? We are capable of seeing past all of this bullshit to the bigger picture at play aren’t we? We don’t benefit by the situation we currently face. They do. Can you see that?
The human species has never gone through such tumultuous change in such a short time and it’s excruciatingly difficult. I believe it leaves us with two choices:
- We step into the chaos and allow millions of our fellow human beings to be wiped out through war or rejection
- Or we say enough, it’s time to rise up together and make this one hell of a magnificent world we all enjoy. It’s time to elevate humanity into the next dimension of human evolution. A kinder world. A more loving world
But we must stop the fear
Here’s a little fear story. I was working for a company based in the World Trade Centre back in 2001 – I was based in Boston then. On that fateful day now known as 9/11, a work colleague stayed in the towers after the planes hit the building. She was under her desk, cowering in fear. But another colleague, a brave woman, went back and coaxed her out, forced her to take action. The two ladies made it out the back door as the tower collapsed. She lived. She wouldn’t have survived if she continued to cower. Fear gets you nowhere. It completely freezes you.
So can we achieve point two? Yes, but we’ve got to listen to the people in fear. We’ve got to hear them and then we’ve got to gently coax them out from under that desk. I reckon there’s enough of us who can do that. I really do. But we must do it with compassion, love and understanding. Brexit showed us that.
Do you think it’s possible? Can we make loving and caring for our fellow humans, as well as our glorious planet, the central driving force of all we do as a species?
I bloody hope so. For my boys, and all the promising futures of children born today.
I mourn the civilians killed in Turkey and the families ripped apart in Nice this weekend. I have mourned every innocent death before that, from every country in the world. But I’ve had enough of fearful thinking and rhetoric the most. What about you?
Yours, without the bollocks
Andrea
Photos courtesy of Shutterstock: Broken world, refugee boat by Nicolas Economou, Police in riot gear and grieving world.
Thanks for reading this and thanks to my husband, Steve Johnson, for patiently editing it and helping me get it more focused. It’s a massive topic and I hope I’ve done it justice. Please feel free to share if it aligns with your thinking, but if you think I’m wrong, I’m really happy to hear from you – in a respectful way. I don’t think I have all the answers and am only trying to share a point of view – one that helps to get us headed in the right direction as a collective species, all sharing the same planet. I don’t want to send my boys off to war one day. Do you?
