I am so sick of all the violence. Killing isn’t the answer to anything. Hate is never a good thing. Over the 4th of July weekend, there were terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Baghdad, & Medina. Here in the US, more young black men shot by police. Now sniper(s?) killing police. Mass shootings in the US have reached a new record. Is lots and lots of death really what we want to achieve as a society? Is this really the society we want to live in? I’m a science fiction writer (among other things). I thought by now we’d be living in a utopia. Why aren’t we? Because people don’t treat each other with love and respect. If we all did that, just that, then all the injustices in the world would be corrected. Everything flows from love and respect. If every person thought about all their actions in terms of the consequence for any other person who might be impacted and made their choices thoughtfully in light of whether they were treating, and thinking of, their fellow human beings with love and respect, there would be very little bad shit in the world. It wouldn’t be totally eliminated because sometimes we make mistakes with the best of intentions, but that intentionality to love and respect your fellow human beings would make the world an infinitely better place. Killing people does not make the world a better place. Killing people makes the world a much worse place. Why? Because it’s a world where people kill each other. Who wants to live in that world???
Every death is a loss of potential. We have no way of knowing the impact someone’s life may have had once they are gone from this world. Perhaps as a science fiction writer who has read my share of alternate universe and time travel stories I’m more acutely aware of this. Remove anyone from this world and the trajectory of hundreds, if not thousands, of lives shift. Every human being makes a difference in the world around us, in the lives of friends and families. No one lives in isolation. This is why we need to treat each other with love and respect.
If you need a more explicit (albeit necessarily incomplete) list of who you shouldn’t kill, see my previous post, “…don’t kill them“, written in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings. I am saddened and dismayed that I’ve now written two back-to-back posts about violence. Both posts are also about the positive creative potential of human beings, but with every death we lose a bit of that. It hurts. I believe that we as a society, as human beings, can be better. I’m fighting to make the world a better place. I’m armed to the teeth: my weapon is words.
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