Every day getting on the Internet recently is like waiting on a phone call you don't want to get. I brace myself, waiting to see what atrocity happened today. Think about how many tragedies you've seen in the past week or so. How many are there? If you have to count them, it's too many. When did it get like that?
I used to be able to delude myself into comfort by saying it's not happening here. All the violence and terror was far away across the ocean. But it's not anymore. Has it ever been? Each breaking news story feels like the click of another empty chamber in Russian Roulette. When's the bullet going to fire? When is tragedy going to hit home? When will the hashtags say "Pray for Cincinnati?" I don't want to sit around and wait to find out.
We need to do something. We need a game plan. Something that's not partisan or political or even religious. It doesn't matter who is right in this situation, because when innocent people get killed none of us are right.
So what should we do? Well here's my easy, one-step fix:
Love and invest in people.
That's all it takes. You don't have to work for an international relief organization. You don't have to donate your entire life savings to a cause. You just have to be kind to one another; genuinely and intentionally. With no agenda, no double standards, no fine print. We need to invest in people because they are people.
I did lie a little bit there. It's not exactly easy. It's the simplest thing to do, but it's so hard. To invest in people we have to give up our time and our pride. We have to think less of ourselves and more of others. I don't know why that's so hard. I don't know why I have such a hard time putting aside my own stupid inflated ego to listen to someone else for a little while, or to help them out when they need something small. Helping people is never going to be convenient. So why do I think it should?
Oh and that other thing? It is one step, but it's not. It's one step, over and over and over and over until you wonder why you even bother doing something so fruitless because clearly it isn't doing any good. It takes a long time. It takes effort. It takes doing something in real life outside of the safety of the Internet. You may never even see the benefit of it and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in it for you.
But what's the alternative? Either we stop thinking that every man is an island and that our goal in life is to build up our own island bigger and grander than everyone else's, or we die by our own hands. Is it harder to love hard-to-love people or is it harder to sit back and watch as chaos creeps closer and closer, killing everything in its wake?
I know writing about it doesn't help; not the way living out my own advice would. I know we don't need to be more aware. We are aware, and that's why our stagnancy is a problem. I am working to take my own advice. I'm trying to go out of my way to love people. And in the meantime, I will write, because writing is what I'm good at. Hopefully, in the future, I will get good at loving people, too.
"Always hold firmly to the thought that each of us can do something to bring some portion of misery to an end." -Unknown
