My Definition of Family
My family? Who is in my family? Well, my father, my mother, my sister, and my brother. But wait, I love my friends too. Are they family to me? I’d say so. Would I sacrifice my own life for their’s? Yes, as I would do for anyone in my family. But my definition of family does not stop there. My family stretches beyond borders and boundaries. My family stretches beyond mountains and seas. My family is the human race. We are one species united by the same human blood, however the unity I seek is not sought by others. Others feel that power is more important than their fellow humans. Others feel that money is more important than their fellow humans. Thousands upon thousands displaced or killed in the wake of a government; a dictator; humans without empathy, without emotion. It is of our own failure when a conflict grows to the extreme before our eyes as we do nothing. We are not useless, we are comfortable. Comfortable we are far away. Comfortable we are safe. The crocodile tears of our supposedly great societies mean nothing as we turn around and close our borders to the people we once "cried" for. Opening the borders means acceptance. It means universal love that transcends social constructs and it means we acknowledge that we all live on the same planet, Earth. The massacre and violence in Aleppo is nothing new to the global war that has progressed through centuries of indescribable and despicably inhumane acts. To hate members of our own species. We are the same within and yet we discriminate, we point fingers, we kill upon difference. Cultures make unique people but we forget that we are all people. There is no mutual respect, there is insatiable greed for the social construct of money and absolute power that only comes to corrupt. The public outcry for those in the "first world" is not the same for those in the "third world". These worlds divided by preposterous societal conventions such as the inferiority of color, inferiority of culture, inferiority of tradition and the premeditated economic divisions. The lack of humanity is repulsive and it vexes and infuriates me to no end that the cries of the people, the masses, the many, fall on the deaf ears of our incapable leaders, our corrupt governments that stand by the money and for the power. The mass media is biased and possessed with a virus of giving information that doesn’t inform but instead shows us that the truth lies. Though hindered by my age, it will not stand in the way of my pursuit of justice, journey for tolerance and unquenchable thirst for peace. I will not stand for the oppression and destruction of my fellow humans and I will take it upon myself to do what I can for the people of Aleppo and for the people of this world.
