Saturday 14 November 2015

The Blame Game

It is natural when bad things happen to need someone to blame. It gives us the ability to distance ourselves from it. "That wouldn't happen to me because..." Or "That won't happen anymore if we just get rid of..." Helps us make sense of something we cannot always understand. But the truth is. This has happened before. It will happen again. Reading any history book you will see pages of good things that happened, examples of human kindness, monumental moments that fill us with hope and a sense of justice. Bad times that brought people together. But at the heart of a lot of these positives there was often a foundation of violence and conflict. There have been wars, murder, terrorism, segregation, slavery and many other horrible examples of human cruelty and thirst for conflict from the cavemen hitting each other with clubs to hitler's genocide. In every example of this kind of atrocity the hatred was fuelled by the orchestrator finding someone to pin the blame on, allowing them to act as puppeteer and fuelling prejudices to divide. Superiority complexes and irrational thoughts combined to make usually rational human beings think incredible things. If a German guy with a little moustache knocked on your door today and said "people with blonde hair and blue eyes are superior, let's all hate the Jews" you would think him mad. If men in white hoods came around and asked if they could hang "inferior" black people in your yard you would call the police and think them insane. If the government decided to kill all gay people, take away the vote for women, bring back forced child labour, you would fight. You would think no, this is not right. So why do we now allow these manipulations to colour our view of our world. People will study us and they will ask "why did they just blame everything on the Muslims". Was it easier than looking at humanity itself and accepting that the problem is much deeper. You cannot force bad people into a box and categorise them based on their religion, their race or any other factor you are comfortable "isn't like me". What we need to look at is the state of our world. Corrupt governments and scary dictator's like Putin with God complex's. He is already attempting to blame homosexuals for the problems in Russia. What happened in Paris is an example of an increase in acts of horrific violence across the world. The only way to fight violence is with solidarity, is not allowing one person or a small group to divide us. Peace is achieved through many methods but a world divided is a world conquered. I do not claim to know how we achieve this.
But I do know that it is our only hope of preventing World War III.

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