Humanity Lost

So, it has come to this. Not that the death of an innocent child is anything new, it's been going on since one of our ancestors first felt the need to eliminate anyone that became inconvenient. But things are different now, right? Our respective monotheistic religions, supposedly advancements over primitive pagan beliefs, teach us to love and care for each other. The general idea, or rule, being that we should treat others like we would hope to be treated.

But the all to ugly reality is that all our religions are just clever facades that have far less to do with compassion and caring for our fellow human beings but are more of a way to disguise our fear of death and excuse our own moral failings. From numerous personal observations nothing brings on a "coming to Jesus moment" like a possible brush with death. The other favorite for many religious types is to use religion as a divinely inspired "get out of jail free cared." Get caught doing something sinful, like many politicians and reality television stars, just start hitting the social media circuit claiming that you have prayed to god asking for forgiveness and you're good to go. More than likely you're still have enough ignorant followers to retain at least a semi-lucrative career in politics or the media. Don't believe me, just look up the current history of the Appalachian Trail walking former governor of South Carolina and current United States congressman, Mark Sanford.   

Yes, there are truly decent and honest people of all faiths who work hard to make the world a better place. But honestly, they seem outnumbered by those who use religion to advance their own personal, ethnic, tribal, or national agendas.

More to the point, a little boy drowned and washed up on a beach because various geopolitical realities made his plight inconvenient. It all starts with a petty piss ant dictator who is so disparate to cling to power he and his cronies pursue a policy of slaughtering their own people. Then comes all the countries surrounding the one where that little boy was born with most of them overwhelmingly practicing the same religion as that dead child's family. What the hell are they doing to prove the validity of their faith?  What the hell are they doing to prove Islam is the religion of peace!?! I don't see any of them lifting a damn finger! Every one of these refugees are fleeing to not to the east but the infidel West.

Then comes the good people of Europe, with the shadow of centuries of monstrous behavior still looming over their countries, they bumble about squawking over what they can't do, pointing fingers at each other claiming their neighbors should do more. The dirty little secret that pervades this lack of organized relief is that many in the Western nations have a fear of being overwhelmed by dirty illegal aliens that will pollute their lily white gene pools.

I'm not leaving out the major powers for special condemnation, especially Russia who just can't seem to push their boy Assad to do the right thing and put a loaded pistol to his head and pull the trigger. Russia is far too busy nursing old national physiological wounds dealing with their asses being massively kicked in the Cold War. The Russians just can't accept that their national power play for global domination failed miserably, now they've got to invade every little country surrounding them to nurse their wounded egos.  They so want to remain a major power on the world scene playing the role of spoiler trying to get some sort of revenge on the United States any way possible. This unfortunately included the possibility of starting the Third World War.

But then again, since the United States rode into Iraq back in 2003 on a full fledged god-ordained crusade the entire Middle East has gone up in flames creating some truly horrific monsters. So in many ways they hold a huge chunk of the blame for that little boy washing up on a beach. Of course the truly sad fact in this is that a majority of Americans either don't comprehend what was done in their name in the Middle East or simply don't care. American freedoms these days revolve around our ability to stay completely self-absorbed watching our big screen televisions. The rest of the human race is some abstract concept that we can't be bothered with because we're "exceptional."

In the end what does the death of a few refugees matter, even small children? Give it a few months and our collective attention span, or lack of one, will have us back pursuing our own selfish agendas while believing god smiles down on all our actions. Because far too many of us believe we can be as big a douchebag as we want and all we have to do to wipe the heavenly slate clean is whisper a small prayer and then carry on as usual.