Are you Syrious?!

Groups of children are playing games on the schoolyard. Some are in blue t-shirts, some in green, yellow and red. The blue group are in the corner of the yard. Some of them break away and try and mix with the other groups. A lot are suspicious of the fact that the blue group wear orange shoes, when everyone else on the yard is wearing purple ones. They push the children in blue t-shirts and won't let them join in. The blue t-shirts stand at the edges, some of the groups more friendly than others. A small sub faction forms amongst some of the blue group. They decide to launch a campaign of water pistol attacks on the green group. As retaliation the green group climb to the top of the climbing frame, drop bags of flour on the blue group and run. Unfortunately some of the blue group who were not involved in the water pistol incidents also got hit. The yellow group joined in. But the red group were a bit more hesitant. Some of the members of the red group were concerned for some friends they had made in the blue group. They asked the leader of the red group if they could get more information, come up with a plan and while they agreed that the blue group and their mission to water pistol the yard was not right they were concerned that dropping bags of flour would just result in innocent members of the blue group getting hurt and further retaliation against the other groups. The leader of the red group wanted to join the yellows and greens. But the red group didn't know if this was because he thought it was a good idea or he was scared the other bigger children would call him a wimp. They decided to launch the flour drop. When you mix flour with water you end up with a mess that will stick to all those around you. The bell rang on the yard and the teachers stood and wondered if any of the children would make it back to class. 

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.