for every action there is a reaction

"My heart is hurting for Paris. And I am feeling so small in the face of Hollande's words, that he will send out more bombs and bullets in response. I want to shout, this is the mistake we made, stop, stop. I am feeling so small reading the hate speech on Twitter, especially coming from a presidential candidate, towards immigrants. Because how can we heal the world with more violence and more hate? And I'm hurting for the 46 killed in Beirut the same night, but there's no Facebook app to update me on the safety of my friends there. There's a Warsan Shire poem going around "show me where it hurts/it hurts everywhere" but she also wrote "you have to understand,/ that no one puts their children in a boat/ unless the water is safer than the land." All of this is connected, I cannot just react to this incident alone...That doesn't honor the dead. There's a link between climate change and ISIS, there's a link between the Gulf war and the Iraq war and ISIS. I think it honors the dead to recognize that the people leading our countries are sick. Why can't they see for every action there is a reaction? There was a slogan used by climate protestors at a die in for the 300,000 climate change victims we lost last year, “somos semillas”—we are seeds. It means the people who have died can be more than tragedies. If we can acknowledge them, grieve them, they have the power to help us build a better world. My heart is hurting because people are being gunned down and our leaders aren't talking about why."

-- Cameron Russell