My heart goes out to mothers of Jihadists, and I need to thank the people of Paris.
These are mothers of children who joined ISIS.
Remember, no one can make you waste your time on any social media platform. Everyone is welcome to scroll through and pick and choose what they want to take a look at. We can all comfortably retreat to our echo chambers and enjoy the solace of our own cliques whenever we feel too annoyed to wince and glance at another person’s point of view.
What I’m sharing now is an interview from the BBC World Service series, Documentaries. “Mothers of Jihadists” reminds us that even the evilest people on earth are human and came from real families, families full of love, hope, and compassion.
It’s easy to let heuristics and biases, our hard-wired xenophobic tendencies, our fears, and emotions push us towards hate. We are all only human. Our genetic differences being insignificant compared to ants. We are one family responsible like no other species with the heavy burden of being able to determine not only our own fate but the fate of other species of life on Earth.
If we surrender to medieval, regressive ideologies by forgetting our own hard fought battles, our enlightenment, and scientific heritage, we have already lost our souls and have become the walking dead. Remember what we are fighting for.
Talk to young people, talk to families, talk to friends and strangers and let them know who you are and why you care. The outsider is just like you, worried and concerned about outsiders.
We can rise to the challenge and do better, or we can go with the flow of fashion, hatred, greed and fear and surrender to fate as if we had no power at all.
Solutions to our problems are complex and difficult to solve so let’s not be too lazy. If we put in a little effort into solving our problems in community with others we can still make things better.
This is what I’ve learned from Paris in 2015. I am grateful to the people of Paris. My heart goes out to mothers of jihadists.
I believe in progress and I am not willing to give up yet. That statement is as close to a prayer as I can stomach right now.
We live in a dark world full of light. How ironic is that?
#JeVis
