It’s In Our Nature. But Why?


  • 30 people killed in a suicide attack at a market in the northern Nigerian city of Yola,
  • 43 People Killed and at least 239 others injured when a pair of suicide bombings struck southern Beirut.
  • Bomb kills all 224 people on board a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula last month.
  • 147 killed  in an attack on Garissa University, in the north-east of Kenya, by the Somali militant group al-Shabab. April 2015.

The list could go on and on and on. These too were disasters caused entirely by monstrous militants or ISIS terrorists.

But how many people changed their Facebook profile picture to the flags of Nigeria, Kenya or Russia. How many trending Twitter hashtags were there for #PrayForNigeria/Kenya/Russia? How many of your followers or Facebook friends focused all their prayers on good thoughts and love toward the people of Beirut during it’s time of need just one day before the Paris incident? Or any of the other countless disasters which have hit our world in the past year.

The simple fact of the matter is, we feel more sensitive and give more sympathy towards any terrorist bombing or outright genocides that happen on our doorstep than to that of people living three thousand miles away. And what’s our excuse? ‘Oh, well, it happens all the time over there so we’re all used to it’… Are you kidding me.

Don’t even get me started on the countless people who completely disregard religion and God for most of their lives and then break in to #PrayFor tweets whenever shit gets crazy. It’s almost as if we as humans feel like we can completely shun the idea of religion and then ‘find’ it whenever we feel we messed up the most. It disgusting.

I’m an atheist and therefore didn’t pray for anyone in the Paris attacks, because I don’t believe that I, as a non-believer of God could do anything for those poor innocent souls. Nor can anyone actually help in any way by changing their Facebook profile to a French flag.

This type of thing has happened so many times in the past few years that I can’t actually be bothered to list every single incident. But i’ve brought it down to the ‘snowball effect’; once enough people have seen enough posts, or news stories, or #hashtags, they join in, regardless of whether or not they actually know anything about what has happened, because they need to be seen by their peers to be doing something to contribute to the ‘united front’ against terrorism. It makes them more liked by their Facebook friends. Or GETS them more LIKES, as is probably the case for most people.

One thing I can’t stand is when people actually believe their lie. They actually begin to believe that they care for these people; that they care for those effected by terrorists around the world. But did they care even just a little for all of those other people killed in recent months? Have they taken ANY notice of more than TWO MILLION innocent souls taken by these evil creatures over the past decade? (Yes, I referred to them as ‘creatures’, these things are NOT human). For anyone who can commit such atrocities is not a civilised being.

If we absolutely must stop everything we’re doing to #Pray for a disaster, then how can we, as some of the most privileged people on the planet, really pick and choose which ones we back? How can we stand by and just let the killings of 147 innocent students at a university go over our heads, and then in the next breath completely devote our entire social media presence and  news rooms to a single disaster? However horrible it may be. We can’t, is the simple and honest answer the that. If you’re going to ignore some attacks, the ignore all of them. Otherwise we need to start caring for our world as a species; and stop simply sticking to our own.

Think about it. Please.

Until next time…



About A Message In A Blog


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s