For Every Drop of Blood... For Every Tear Shed...

The circumstances of our time that occupy our attention by the force with which they press their hurtful presence into the vulnerable flesh of our shared humanity keep us wide-eyed and broken-hearted. We witness the pain of those whose flesh and hearts are torn asunder by the brutality of cruel actors in our midst. Men, women, and children are daily torn apart by the harsh and inhumane edges that fly indiscriminately through the air we breathe, destroying the places we once found to be safe. Bodies are literally being torn apart, ripped limb from limb by actors whose hearts have been hardened by their own inhumanity, and by cruel circumstance.

Blood everywhere. Ominous smoke-filled skies bear witness to habitats once bubbling with hopes and dreams... Now rubble. Men and women cut down in the prime of life; a few blowing themselves to unrecognizable bits and pieces in their quest to express the hopelessness cultivated by a warped sense of being. Some believe they are doing the will of a god whom they believe beckons them to a new and better world. The noise of war, and the strife all around, deafens and numbs so absolutely that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the call and the rebuke of their God. Between Good and Evil there exists a gulf of amorality. Between those who care and those who don't, are those who celebrate their corrupt sense of being as if it were a  necessary virtue... An existential prerequisite... A badge of honor.

Wars and rumors of wars grab our attention and occupy us in ways that foster a disequilibrium which is in essence the state in which we have come to exist. In this state we stagger from one scene of death and destruction to the next. From Iraq to Syria... From France to Mali... From Oklahoma City to Paris. From Colorado Springs, Colorado, to San Bernardino, California. The bleeding and the burning predominates in our Media-cultivated subconscious. In the absence of a profoundly critical sense of awareness despair replaces hope, and fear corrupts our yearning for community. In this kind of environment the carnival barker out-shouts the sage. The self-serving opportunist builds a monument to raw ambition. And all this while our country in particular and the world in general lags in its need of moral leadership. The signs of the times are obscured by dollar signs. And, of course, the merchants of death and their faithful servants fill coffer after coffer, all the while ignoring the trail of grief that runs parallel to their profit margins.

Let us pause for a moment and balance ourselves. Let us occupy again that place in our lives where we are in fact and in deed the determiners of our destinies. In the midst of every effort to constantly occupy us with a life-sucking pessimism, let us find a place and a moment to recalibrate our sense of being co-creators of our world. It is not that the whole world has gone mad. It is not that we have all of a sudden lost our moral compass as a civilization. In the midst of all that is so disastrously terrible, are voices calling us to account for what we are now experiencing as the overwhelming expressions of Man's inhumanity to Man. Let us be a part of that choir of hope-filled voices. Let us join our souls together with those who even now are requiring an accounting for the apparent madness that impacts us all through our connectedness of being.

For every child laying dead on a beach or in a shot-up or blown-up building somewhere, a thousand children hope and pray for a more secure world. Let us be loving family to these children. Let us reach out to them with all our substance. Let us open our borders and our doors to them and to their kin. Let us join forces against those who would allow fear to deny the widow and the orphan a place among us contrary to the values that we claim as an exceptional people. For every violent incident in a city somewhere there are a hundred cities committing to work for a more just and and a more peaceful world.

Let us in this moment recognize and affirm the inseparable link between our yearning for Peace and the necessity for Justice in this our world. Let us be a part of that movement for Justice and Peace in our own cities, and towns, and districts, and countries. In the presence of the injustice that destabilizes communities and countries, there must be a world willing to work together for greater equity. Let us get involved. Let us say something. Let us write something. Let us do something to make a difference. Speak up. Act up. We remain silent and complacent to our own detriment, because our connectedness of being will not spare us the pain that our fellow humans must witness and endure.

Against the cycle of harshness and pessimism that would engulf us, we who hope for a more peaceful world must rise up against the clamor of desperation that would have us believe that all is lost. Let us become sources of warmth and light in the presence of doom and gloom. The voice of Reason demands that we not ignore the mayhem that jolts us so profoundly. That voice requires us to look beneath and beyond all the superficial analysis to find the true causes of the sickness that is becoming an epidemic in our midst.

For every drop of blood... For every tear shed... For every life lost... For every limb and every heart broken... We, yes... you and I, must resolve to never give up hope... We must resolve to never give in to despair... We must never stop working for a better world here and now. We, through our singular and collective resolve, can be bulwarks of the promise that through Love, expressed as justice for all, we can conquer Fear and its torment. We can build oases in the desert places where hate has scarred the landscape of our lives, and brought death where life once flourished. Let us be like that. Let us live like that. Let us.