All the madness in the world will only stop when we start seeing one another as human beings, nothing more.
We are killing each other at a rate that surpassed "ridiculous" a long time ago. It's crazy! There is so much anger and hatred and fear in so many of us at the moment, and it's destroying our potential as citizens of the world.
Everywhere we look, someone is being classified or labeled as black, white, Indian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, gay, straight, bisexual, rich, poor, middle-class, Republican, Democrat. The list goes on. While these things are most certainly parts of a whole, they should not define us to a point that we are nothing more than a label.
What if we were just "people". Sure, there are white people that are KKK members, Muslims that are terrorists, black people that are criminals, but there are also racist black people, criminal white people and Christian terrorists and extremists. These people are the minorities and definitely do not represent entire groups of good, honest, hard working people.
I loathe ISIS! I detest everything that they stand for, but I know that their beliefs are in direct contrast to the beliefs of the majority of Islam.
The potential that we, as citizens of the world, possess is far greater than we can even comprehend. There are six billion of us on the planet, and yet we allow a small number of nutcases to keep us divided, and keep us from achieving what's possible.
What if a white police officer was just a police officer, or a black business owner was just a business owner? What if a Muslim scientist was just a scientist, and a lesbian lawyer was just a lawyer?
When we assign these prefixes to who people are, we put individuals in groups that may or may not have a number of negative connotations attached to them. Grouping all Jewish people together as fraudsters simply because a handful of crooked investment bankers happened to be Jewish, is not only absurd, it also serves absolutely no useful purpose. It does not move our planet towards progress of any kind. In fact, it results in regression.
We could achieve so much if we began to see each other as fellow human beings, all in this together. We could cure disease, end poverty and educate every child. We could create incredible new technologies and find answers to questions that have remained unsolved for centuries. But none of this is possible as long as we allow these whackjobs to continue to speak on behalf of all of us. These lunatics do not represent the masses. We should all represent just one group - human beings.
Until we stop the madness of labeling, profiling and characterizing entire groups of people, based on the actions of a few broken, weak, pathetic individuals, we will continue to see the world falling further and further into chaos. We have so much potential, and while we should absolutely celebrate our uniquenesses, they should never serve to keep us from living, working and building up our world together. Not as blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Muslims, rich, poor, gay or straight, but simply as people.
