Allow me to stand on a soap box for a moment: This may be long but I feel it needs to be said:
Robert Belton; a WW2 vet was brutally beaten to death by two teenagers the other night. The news has made a point to headline the news with telling that the teens who killed this man were black. Not just the horrible news that a man was murdered, but that his killers were of a specific race, as if that fact had to be made a point of. Now, people are outraged that this story has been supposedly hidden by the media because Belton was white. They are using the example of Trayvon Martin to prove this supposed bias.
You know what outrages me? The fact that EVERY SINGLE DAY I see that someone was brutally murdered, or someone was raped, or some other horrible news. Just today I saw a picture on the news of a Syrian mother holding her dead child in her arms who had been killed by chemical weapons. I’m outraged by US as a world.
It is 2013. In a few days it will be 50 years since Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. How much have we let the dream of King’s die? Again, it is 2013 and we STILL are holding on to hatred of someone because of their skin color or the region they were born. As a society we continue to bridge the gap between us. I did not ask to be born white. No one asks to be born the way they are. We are all just born. Born into this world, and at the deepest level, we are all just pretending that we have any idea why we are here or what if anything this life means.
And with that said, we only have a SHORT time on this planet. We are all going to die and become a distant memory in what is nothing but a blink of an eye of the time of this universe. And to this day we hang on to this hatred, greed, and destruction. We should be outraged by the fact that anyone would take someone’s life, not because they are white or black, but because it is abhorrent to kill someone. Why add the fuel of hatred to an issue that is a problem of society instead of working to fix it?
Prejudice and bigotry come from a lack of education and an unwillingness to understand someone who is different from themselves. It is a learned behavior! And to continue these ideas it perpetuate this same hatred on generation after generation. If we would expend half the energy we put into being outraged into actually fixing the problem, we could change the world. But instead of that we continue to cycle it on and on.
Martin Luther King’s dream has not died, but it has been sorely forgotten. You can call me idealistic to believe we can live in a world that can let go of this hatred and prejudice, but as far as ideals go, why isn’t this something we can aspire to be? We’ve evolved as a species, we’ve invented amazing things, and when things go badly we can rally together to help each other. Why can’t we live this way each day? If we take the time to love each other a little more, understand each other a little more, we could make this a better place. Not only for ourselves, but for our children, and those generations on past us.
