I’ve got a few bones to pick with players who like to get on social media and make attempts at sounding smart.

   For a good year now most of the world has been decrying the actions of ISIS. This has been news on and off, terrorizing our minds, and imprinting the question “how could any human being do this? When they caged and burned a Jordanian pilot alive, when they beheaded 12 Christians who by the way would not classify as “white”, when they pushed homosexuals off rooftops, and every thing in between or since, I have looked at the petty narcissistic things that we in America call “oppression” or “hate” and wondered how we even function. I expected after the attack on Paris (their second and most deadly) that for a moment the catered to students at high class universities might actually have some real life compassion or at least see reason. That wasn’t to be. All day I have seen other write ups and blogs like mine which repeat the narcissistic tweets from Missouri spouting how the media is “using” the tragedy to sweep this nations racist problems under the rug. Then the ones that call out “sick white people who only care when other white people die”. You know, because it’s Paris and only white people are french…which would be classified as a racist statement I do think. I’m not going to give them any more traction by repeating them, that is what google is for. I don’t know how grown men begging for the lives of their wives to be spared and survivors hiding among dead bodies in pools of blood, equals alleged name calling. I don’t know how it equals wealthy students fighting free speech that disagrees with them. If a real hate group came on campus and opened fire, and blew themselves up and took the lives of half the campus, then yes that would be equal but that is not happening. Thank God that is not happening, but sometimes it seems that the mass media and social media and it’s pawns wish that those kinds of atrocities would happen. We suffer from a serious lack of empathy in this country, and according to psychology that is actually called narcissism. I actually wrote a thesis on cultural narcissism. We love to hate ourselves here, and then blame everyone else for the scars.
     Days before the Paris massacre, ISIS also hit Beruit, but it wasn’t as big as news. Apparently this is also a result of racism. Is this “Racist” or is it just the magnitude of PARIS. If it had been Tokyo or Rome I’m sure the outpouring would have been the same. Images of Paris are part of our thought patterns whether we have been there or not. Art of all kinds is influenced by Paris. Fashion icons are only made in Paris. Paris is always a good idea according to Sabrina (think Audrey Hepburn), So it makes sense that the average American becomes sick to their stomach when they see her streets look like a war zone, it naturally shakes and disturbs. That’s natural I think. Quite honestly I’ve been disturbed and shaken more than once in the past two years. So much so that I’ve had to stop following many facebook pages, and media forms that play ISIS stories and commentaries on repeat. I’ve had to stop following some celebrities that help the bandwagon of half truths get around the world and abuse the words “hate” and “sexism”. I’ve felt like a voice lost among millions of voices. I’ve slept a lot because it is easier than engaging, I’ve let my apartment go to shit more than once, because it seems all I do is work and go home and read a lot of belly aching. I’m over that. At times, I’ve had to tell others to snap out of their self loathing state, and sometimes good people have had to tell me the same.

     I get it, we are all conditioned to feel like we deserve something more than we have. Like we are entitled, that entitlement theory that conservatives like to throw around is just as much poison as the liberals throwing around “privilege”, because we all have suffered or been divided by both theories.  I, a singe woman who works a full time job, with zero financial support from any one else, with much more debt going out than money coming in, graduated with a bachelors this past May and got not so much as a congratulations card. Wow things were so much easier when you were a kid and every Birthday you got a few cards with five bucks in them, and when you got out of high school all your elders acted like this was the height of your entire life. Too bad it wasn’t the height of our lives  and we had to keep going. We have to keep going and to do it we have to think past the bull crap. We have to get out of our safe spaces, because the work place doesn’t have those. Friendships don’t have those. Life doesn’t have those. Your home is your safe space. Your head is your safe space. My bed is mine, but I got out of it this evening and kissed my big fat cat bye and came to engage in a hipster coffee shop where African Americans, possibly lesbian Americans and white girls talking through their noses, somehow manage to drink coffee and not shoot each other up. Too bad we don’t see the irony in our woes.Too bad every single one of us cant go visit someone who is considerably less privileged than any of us-because if we are honest all of us has some privileges. Too bad we cant  be grateful before it is too late and we have to remember what we were grateful for. Too bad that we live in a world so stuck on definitions that we can watch people get shot down, beheaded and set on fire and we still want to cry over perceptions of microaggressions and theories of privilege that put all people of each color in their consecutive camp and no one can deviate. Funny, the same place where all these theories came from are the same places that blame religion and racism for doing the same things. 

     ISIS doesn’t care if you are gay, straight, black, white or Asian -oh yes they also don’t care if you are Native American, they have the same statement of declaration for all of us. Paris doesn’t care if the nations reaching out to them in prayer and support are white, black or Jewish.THAT is what true liberal nations are supposed to be and these naval gazing student bodies that have been birthed in liberal college campuses need to venture outside their own boundaries and realize that, while they may still appreciate it. By the way, the American student studying in Paris who was one of those killed, was a young Latina woman.