What the war in the Middle East says about us as a race.

I woke up to the news about the death of 400 people in Syria, including 150 children. The one thing that shocked me more than the news itself was how indifferent I was to it. Deaths have become so common to us that it’s just like the weather forecast now; you make it a point to get the basic knowledge about it and then you just don’t care. That is the way the world is behaving with the Middle East civil war.

Imagine if an alien looked down at us at some point in time. We would be the weirdest species they would ever see. I think we are the only race that fights with each other, for absolutely no valid reason at all. We are all slaves to a rectangular piece of paper called money, and get away with a lot of things in the name of power and wealth. We make up a system of beliefs and fight each other to death if there’s s a disagreement.

It’s shocking that you have to go to war to prove your point. Can’t you talk it out like sensible adults? We’re not kids, for god’s sake. There is nothing that cannot be resolved without talking it out first. And the fact that you do this even when you know that you’re going to destroy the future of hundreds of thousands of peoples’ lives just for the sake of it. Where will the satisfaction of triumph be after you’ve won, when so many people are driven away from home, living in a strange land, with no proper history or culture to call their own, doing odd jobs to feed their family. Tell me, was this your aspiration when you went to war? Using war as a way to project your military prowess is the lowest form of humanity.

It’s not only the people who are fighting that are to blame; the media gets a fair share of the blame too. The incident of a dead boy washed ashore, lying facedown more than two years ago caused such a huge uproar that the planet was nudged awake for a brief moment, and looked around at the chaos happening in its midst. But that’s just it. The sad, tragic scene moved us, and rose up but for a few days., and then someone famous gave birth to their first child and we’re back to the oblivious slumber.

As John Green said, “The marks people leave are almost always scars.”

This planet that we call home has been through a lot. It has survived even dinosaurs and the worst of the natural disasters and will continue to do so even after we are gone. So it’s us we need to conserve, not our planet.

We forget that we are all part of a very vast universe. No one is big enough on this planet. We are just a mere speck floating in nothingness, spinning around a flaming ball of fire and gas. When you look at the bigger picture, all this fighting and war and deaths and achievements and failures mean nothing. We’re all going to leave this place one day, and when you do, you need to be remembered for all the good things that you did, not the amount of destruction you caused or how many lives you took.

Because we’re all humans, and we’re all in this together. Why waste your life waging war on others and disrupting life when you can spread love and make this world a better place?

.Peace.