In vulnerable moments like this, it’s easy to point fingers and search for somebody to blame. Half of fear comes from the unknown, so when there’s an opportunity to find someone (or some people) and place all the hatred and blame onto them it feels relieving, a sense of closure, enabling us to move onto the next topic. However, life is not that black and white, and this default mentality is an easy gateway to discrimination. It’s elementary to be blinded by hatred and resentment, it’s essentially taking the easy way out, but we must, keyword must, resist this.
The remarkable Dr Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” It’s a quote that I keep saved on my phone so I can routinely refer back to it and remind myself how important it is to show love and consideration to others, no matter what is being sent back to myself. A fact that nobody wants to hear is that ultimately, love is a choice. Everyday we wake up and subconsciously make the choice to love our neighbour. Vice Versa, you can also wake up and decide to use your energy to spread hatred, which seems like a waste of time since there is already so much natural tragedy in our world. This can be applicable on a smaller scale also, just by being a nice, sensitive human being. Sounds like rocket science doesn’t it?
After tragic events like recently (Christina Grimmes murder, the Orlando shooting e.t.c) it’s one of life’s biggest tests to separate the faithful from the weak. Remove the idea of religion, I mean faithful in its most innocent form, to have faith in our world and the people living in it. Although it may seem that crime rate is wildly increasing in the Western world due to media reports and representation, the world has actually never been so safe to live in (according to documented statistics) and we mustn’t forget how far we have come as a society. But we are not perfect; we still have a long way to go. But this great task is only made increasingly harder by a number of individuals who choose to inflict even more harm into the world. Regarding the recent Orlando night club shooting, I’ve seen multiple tweets instilling the idea that the entire Islam religion should be held accountable for this attack on the LGBT community, I can’t help but think this is a double negative, since right now as we speak we are trying to rid laws in the south that are trying to deprive the transgendered community of their right to healthcare service. But suddenly, to protect the precious 2nd Amendment, we are showing some support for a group of people that were so strongly discriminated against pre-shooting. This seems more than manipulative, and very sadistic. How far are we willing to go to keep guns? In modern America, where fifty people can be shot and more than fifty people can be injured in one shooting, how safe do you feel? We must not use an event like to project hatred onto another group of people. Hatred is never going to end the act of hatred.
Love is love. Love is the only thing that is going to protect humanity. It’s the only thing that is going to keep us safe. After all, as much as I dislike the saying “guns don’t kill people, people do” I’d be blind to not recognise the degree of accuracy. If the man who murdered Christina Grimme woke up that day and decided to love, would the later events occurred? I’m not a psychologist to any extent and I do not believe we should be giving any mercy to a cold-blooded killer, but it would have been interesting to find out what that man was feeling/thinking on June 11th.
So here lies another act of terror, another speech given by our president, reeling in sadness over another shooting. Here we have another debate over gun laws on social media. When, America, are you going to decide to love your people as much as you love your history?
