Twenty-five weeks after the first day of the second new year

Author has been grappling with what her post this week will be about. Work can easily dominate it, but it wasn’t work that dominated her thoughts these past days, it was our world, or rather us, its keepers. And just to be clear, this isn’t going to be a long post, but it’s likely not to be the last of its kind, either.

A lot can be said about what we all saw this past week. A lot can be said about what’s been happening in our world for quite a while now. Wherever you live, you would have seen it, heard it, perhaps even felt it. If you haven’t, then take the time to look around you. Watch the news or read it online, not just local news but national and international, too. You don’t think you need to know and are under the notion that you’re safe and will remain so? You think it’s got nothing to do with you? That what’s going on in what you see as places far enough away could never impact you? That others will deal with it and you don’t need to bother?
You’re wrong.

Our world is small. What happens anywhere in it will impact you eventually. You, and your loved ones. Today, a year, a decade from now, the impact will come, and it won’t be a good one. And there is nowhere to run. You can escape a city, a country, a continent, but you can’t escape the planet we’re on.

The effects of bad leadership, economic miscalculations, wars, crime, natural disasters and climate change are felt globally. The effects of people choosing to turn away from anyone whom they perceive as an outsider, as not belonging, as not one of their own, to replace empathy and rational thinking with fearmongering, hate and blame, that’s felt globally.

But something else is felt globally. Good people. People who stand up to cruelty and injustice by travelling far to help victims, or by helping those closer to home. People who are protesting, people who strive to become the leaders of a better future, people who strive to change their lives and those of their neighbors in a hopeful way, to find viable solutions to problems ultimately faced by us all. There are many good people, and we must be among them. Doing our share in our own surroundings, remembering that it could be us that are suffering, and that in fact it would be if we continue on the path we’re on. That’s on us.

Author’s tip for today: the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing (Edmund Burke, with a slight change you will have noticed).