HEAL THE WORLD

Hi Readers,

Sorry I've been gone for so long but I am back! My absence has been due to a mixture of being sick, stressed and working non-stop. 

This week I'm writing a bit of a sad post, probably because I feel sad today. Sad about the world in general. How do you choose what to write about when there are so many attacks, shootings, bombs, threats to write about in the space of even a week? How is it fair to write about one and not the others? 

This week I was studying memory, and whilst writing out my notes I wrote down the definition of 'flashbulb memories' - detailed recollections of when and where we heard about shocking events. This got me thinking at the age of just 21, how many flashbulb memories do I already have? How many do my parents have? My grandparents? 

I think my first is probably 9/11, I was almost 6 years old and in our old kitchen sat a tiny box TV on top of our kitchen fridge. I have the vaguest memory of seeing one of the towers in smoke on that TV and my mum standing unable to take her eyes off what was happening in front of her as I sat at the kitchen table.  Next was probably the London Bombings, which I have an even more vague memory of despite being older. 

More recently was the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and the hostage situation that followed. The Paris attacks, the Boston Marathon, Brussels and more. 

Then in the past couple of weeks we've seen an attack on Westminster, a chemical attack in Syria, the US launching bombs in Syria, and now the Dortmund football team's bus has been bombed. These are just some attacks from a list of 53 this month on wikipedia. 

All of this makes me feel so hopeless, like what is the point in fighting ISIS, or terrorists in general - where do we start? Isn't it just easier to convince ourselves to just give in and go along with what they want? I think this then immediately think no, this is not how I should be thinking. We can fight them and we will, we just need to work out how. 

But these thoughts also lead me to thinking about what the root cause of the problem is. And to me, it is religion. I often wonder how much more evolved we'd be as the human race if religion hadn't been holding us back for so many hundreds of years (note - I'm talking about all religion, not just one). It also baffles me how people can believe so wholeheartedly in a God (or Gods, whoever that may be) that they are willing to kill and live their whole lives according to what their God supposedly wants, because it says so in a book they may or may not have written thousands of years ago.

I think the thing that annoys me most about religion is its reluctancy to progress. Imagine if we stuck with the first pieces of technology simply because they were there first. I wouldn't be sitting on my MacBook writing this post with an iPhone 6 sitting next to me. I wouldn't be able to watch a film, read the news and take a photo all from one device. I wouldn't be able to make a cup of tea or play my music through my speakers. How much have we learned and evolved in the last 100 years simply because of technology? Now how much further do you think we'd be if religion was willing to change and mould with the times too. 

The world is a scary place just now, and all these attacks with no clear way to stop them makes my head feel jumbled up and messy (kind of like this post). I just want to scream at everyone to shut up, take a few deep breaths and calm it down. How did humanity get to a point where we have imaginary lines in the land that mean that people can't come and live here? How did we end up having these huge fights about religion and whose God is the 'real' God? How did people end up stabbed, bombed, shot and attacked for living their life differently to others? 

How do we fix it? 

Times like these I often remember Enter Shikari's lyric; "fear begins to vanish when we realise that countries are just lines drawn in the sand with a stick."

Sorry for this jumbled, rambly post but I needed to vent this somehow. My thoughts go out to all the victims and their family's of all the shocking attacks in the last few weeks and months. Remember that love trumps hate and be kind to people. As always you can find me on; 

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