A Heart-sickening Mass of Humanity and the Mentality behind It
While many of us live in the ‘best of all possible worlds’, many more now live in the ‘worst of all possible worlds’. Perhaps in a planet now under pressure from unprecedented human overpopulation, this situation is rather predictable. We have a huge cabal of bitter, ignorant insensitive yapping self serving personages, with callous disregard for others, unrestrained across the globe. The solution, for this cabal, whatever the problem, is always violence and total disrespect for human diversity. Their words and actions create hatred and turmoil across a troubled planet. While too numerous to list they include Putin, King Jong-un of North Korea, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ayaatollah Ali Khamenei, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the list goes on and on.
Anyone with a remote sense of history knows that violence always begets violence. We know this when parents use violence on children, when any group uses violence on another group, when one nation uses violence on another nation—whenever violence is preached as a solution, the revengefulness will elevate the violence even further. Deranged leaders like Hitler and Stalin may be the worst, but many religious and racial conflicts are not far behind. Many of the victims are those least able to defend themselves and this, of course, includes children.
When a 15 year old kid, homesick for his mom and grandparents, stows away in the wheel hub of an airplane in an attempt to get to Ethiopia, the story is miraculous in that he survived, and difficult to fully comprehend. While the story may have intrigued and saddened myself and many others, it clearly is perceived by many in this country with inner rage against the kid. Below is a handful of examples of comments following an article about the incident:
Wow!!! I just went to cut and paste some of the comments, and at the end of the article it said “comments are now closed for this article”. I surmise the comments were so repulsive that even Fox News decided to muzzle their own followers.
Comment after comment was vitriolic anger towards this kid. They hated him, and despised he even existed in this country. He was, to them, stupid, a worthless piece of shit, with no redeeming qualities at all, a clear potential terrorist just like the Russian brothers who set a bomb off at the Boston Marathon last year. And so it went on. I regret I could not paste any of these responses. There were many responses, and almost all of them of the same ilk.
Here are the known facts about this ‘worthless piece of shit’. He was raised as a child in rural Somalia. Then his world was turned upside down by the destruction of his home village in Somalia, not very different from the kind of violence taking place in dozens of areas around the globe. The family ended up in an Ethiopian refugee camp after a long dangerous, and difficult trek on foot. His parents went through a bitter divorce and his Dad grabbed the kids and the family became part of a group of Somalian refugees sent to the U.S. The boy has no formal education. He has been in this country 4 yrs. The dad is a taxi driver. The kid is a freshman in a California High School. With no prior formal education and coming from a rural quiet community (before soldiers attacked his village), the boy suffers extreme culture shock, and with language difficulties on top of everything else, students said he rarely spoke to anyone. He told the few he spoke to that he missed his mom and his life in Somalia before the attack.
All these vitriolic haters of this kid, if justice were meted out, would have these haters go through a similar sequence of events at his age. And by their own standards they would be just as stupid a jerk as they labeled him. I lost a dog when I was about his age when he was in Somalia. and that was a difficult loss for me to bear. I cannot imagine the profound impact on this kid from all these events that would have impacted on most any child forced to suffer through such endless traumatic situations. They made fun of the fact he was so stupid to do such a thing, so stupid to not even know where the plane was going, and these haters were so angry he was even let into this country.
Who is more despicable, a person with no formal education, or an educated person (If I can use the term loosely) with a total inability to comprehend the difficulties such a child faced relentlessly year after year, and with that incomprehension, then generate such contempt for a 15 year old kid brave enough to take the ultimate risk to regain a life of happiness lost years ago.
Who are the leaders and those who support such widespread terror, death, and injury to innocent unarmed civilians in such huge numbers, along with the accompanying physical damage to their environment? Attila the Hun and Ghenghis Khan are small players compared to their counterparts today. The part that really hurts is that for the last 50 years it has been the U.S. which has killed/injured more people, and destroyed more property in other countries than any other nation. How can a nation which so rightfully mourns the death of 3000 innocent Americans in the World Trade Center explosion be so insensitive to it’s own indiscriminate killing of citizens in other countries? We often don’t directly initiate the violence but simply join in and multiply the violence exponentially with our smart bombs, missiles, and tanks.
Almost all this violence today is the result of intolerance to human diversity, and non adherence to the global ethical principle of the Golden Rule. Whether it is the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, the Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, the Muslims and Christians in Africa, the Russians and non Russians in Ukraine, the main land Chinese and Chinese in Formosa, the Hindu’s and Muslims in India/Pakistan, the wealthy and the poor most everywhere, or whatever, it is this intolerance and and disregard for the Golden Rule which fuels all these conflicts. Why now is all this getting so bad and so prevalent in so many areas of the globe? Irresponsible reproduction is the subtle force which drives much of it and will make it just worse with every succeeding year. Every one wants a decent piece of the pie and those with the biggest pieces want bigger pieces never ending. There is no such thing as enough is enough for those whose whole purpose in life is to amass more and more till death finally parts them from their wealth, and then they bequeath that wealth to a genetic cabal in which non of the recipients can remotely claim they earned the wealth in which they will then wallow.
The 15 year old boy is named Yahya Abdi. Who knows whether he is salvageable after all he has been through? For all I know he might be an incorrigible lost cause at this point. Maybe his bravery, no matter how reckless and ignorant, will get him some professional help to deal with a world that has been so oppressive and unfair to him. The sad thing is so what? There are millions, probably billions, of other personages out there of all ages, trapped in the consequences of these bitter, ignorant insensitive yapping self serving leaders and their followers who see no value in others different from themselves. Many of these others are right here in our own country, for now gated off from those of us more affluent. Lincoln himself, the ultimate expert on human behaviors, would be hard pressed to right our planetary ship. Too much, too fast, too often is coming at us from every direction. If this kid hops into another airplane wheel hub, well maybe I will hop in too. Why not, does it make any difference in this new global economy where the plane is going? More and more it is the same old, same old.
