I am a massive Jack Johnson fan. I am a fan of most all feel good music. And I have found myself wondering lately, where are the good people? I stopped using social media over a year ago, I believe. It was too much. Information overload. And everywhere I went, I just kept wondering, why do people want other people to suffer so much?
Trust me, I get it. We have kids here, too. We have kids in foster care being placed into homes that aren’t treating them well. Scared kids who need someone to turn to, but the system managing them doesn’t have time to hear about the horrors they’re being subjected to, because, according to the person holding their case file, they are a troublemaker. We have kids in this country who need love, too. No one person’s tragedy or story is more important than another’s.
I didn’t grow up here, in the United States, and I wasn’t born here. Before you ask, yes, I am a citizen, army brat. What I do know from growing up is that, when I was 15, I met a girl from Venezuela who had clearly lived a very privileged life up to a certain point, and I remember her telling me how things were. How her family had paid someone to smuggle them out of the country because her grandfather was a businessman, and the new regime had come in and stolen all of their possessions, kidnapped people, and killed people. They ran and hid and were able to escape. I was 15, and while I had been through my own tragedies and deaths, I never had to hide from my government.
So, when people from Venezuela began pouring into our country because my country is a loving country with loving people, there were people who weren’t loving. Just like in every country. There were protests. Angry people. I remember one day she was crying because tragedy had struck her family. And, even at 15, I understood that people were people and people matter. Every person matter,s and every person has a story, and every story is hugged with pockets of tragedy. Immigration issues are not isolated to the United States of America. The one thing I learned after moving to this country at 18, thinking I was running away from a third-world country, was that there was no difference between my new country and my country.
And I know I may offend some people by saying my country, but you don’t know how to appreciate other cultures until you leave this country, and you learn that kindness and hate are universal. No one is shielded and, in the years since I left, I’ve learned that it wasn’t the country I hated. It was the story I lived for the first 18 years of my life. Leaving was a clean slate. I was a ghost in the United States.
Evil is evil. People need to understand that. There are things I lived through as a teen that I am sure would not have happened to me in the United States. It could have been better, but also worse. So when I saw that Maduro had been captured, I said to myself good. Because no 15-year-old should have to be smuggled out of a country so they have a chance at life. People in the United States have mass shootings in schools. Other countries have crimes too. It might not be that. It might be the daughter of a wealthy politician killing pedestrians while high on cocaine, but she called her father before anyone found out, so he could clean it up. And the only reason he could clean it up was that they were indigenous, and even in third-world countries, indigenous people can be treated poorly. Some evil exists everywhere. And yes, this is a true story, but it isn’t one you will see in the news because corruption exists everywhere.
The point of this isn’t to compare, but it’s to ask, when did we get so confused about what is right and wrong? So when I saw the news pop up that a mother had been shot by US Customs Border Agents, the only thing that came to my mind was, oh my God. I hope she didn’t have kids. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, I cannot imagine leaving my children behind. As I watch my kids dance and play, I cannot imagine dropping them off at school, and they will never see me pick them up again. So when I saw comments on articles saying things like, good and play stupid games, win stupid prizes, all I could think was, when did we get like this?
People always talked. People have always had opinions, but where has the empathy gone? Where did all the good people go? People who would hold the door when you were in front of them, and then, if someone was behind them, they would (if possible) grab the door so you could carry on, and this was the original pay it forward. Lately, I find myself not wanting to hold the door for others because, generally, if there is a line of traffic, people will act like you are their doorman. When I see kind, empathetic people place themselves in this situation and have an awkward look on their face, I generally offer myself as the next lamb.
So when I read the article and saw that the person killed was a mother, all I could think of was the kid. I am not debating videos. I am not debating facts. When did we as a society start caring so little for the people around us? A child does not need to bear the burden of their parents. A child deserves to be protected. We have all been roped into the greatest scam by participating in a society that believes children are the workforce, and we are all here to work. The worst thing that happened to the world were wars. People should be allowed to explore and create, to be more than slaves to a time clock.
Kids deserve more from us. Kids don’t deserve to be picked on because of where they are from or who their parents are. None of us requested to be here. But to be freshly placed on this earth and have to go through something traumatic does not make you interested in the potential of having to endure more trauma for an average of sixty or seventy more years, depending on your lifespan.
I am not arguing politics. Both sides have evil, and most politicians have been involved in questionable dealings, in my opinion. I am arguing for humanity. Where did our humanity go? What is wrong with us? We need more good people. We don’t need kids who are going to check out in a decade because the first decade has been hell. I know those kinds of kids because I was that kid. I have not met any other army brats and have never cared to research, but being in a military family is part of my trauma because of the mental issues that stemmed from being in a military career for 25 years.
As Death Cab said, sometimes I think this cycle never ends. When I left at 18 and came to the United States of America, I thought, as a lot of people do. That there were a lot of opportunities and that I could be something. I had a little bit of money and a big dream. I was rejected from a couple of publishers, and I ended my dream there, deciding that maybe my parent was right and being a novelist isn’t a career. There weren’t more opportunities, but there were different opportunities, but life is hard, and coming from nothing was hard because an international education doesn’t translate easily in this country. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world that pushes them to work like a zombie, and I want to inspire them. We need to do better for the kids. All of them. At one point, we were kids, and someone should have done better for us.
In the end, I suppose I want to share a message to a world that feels so dark at times. We need more good people, and sometimes good looks scary, and it might not seem like you’re a good person because you feel glad about bad things happening to bad people. We are human. And the fact that you want better and are actively spreading that thought process is important. Good is messy. Yin and yang still mix. And the only thing we need to figure out is where all the good people went.
Until next time.