I’m sick of Death. Worn down from the personal losses and the always at war world I’ve lived in all my adult life.

I’m beyond dismayed that diplomacy is no longer a tool used to prevent mass killings, that the united world we envisioned after WW2 has been trampled under the heavy boots of armies marching in the service of greed and racism and fascism. I am sick to my soul at the masses of children and elders murdered in Sudan, Mali, Central African Republic, and the other places some of you actually care about, like Ukraine, Palestine, or Israel. Every age yes, but kids and elders tend to among the most vulnerable groups and to have fewer choices in their locals, self defense, etc.

And yes, that was a note of bitterness, because the fact that only certain wars are reported and that only the lives of certain groups matter is at the root of so much of what continues to go wrong, on micro and mega scales across the earth. That some humans are equated with animals means that (A) you don’t know that humans are animals and (B) you think that the value and lives of some animals are less important than yours. Why? Simple: they don’t serve you/your purposes. You don’t understand them or their purpose, therefore they are irrelevant to your limited minds.

Humans don’t create anything but each other and poop (that for the most part isn’t even good fertilizer). You destroy plants and animals and then realize that they were necessary to the environment and therefore your life and its quality. Yet you persist in destruction with the obviously false arrogance that you’re the most valuable and intelligent creatures! No other animals foul their own nests and none attempt to eliminate entire groups of their own species out of greed.

And it almost always boils down to greed and envy: spices, gold, land, oil, minerals, and on and on. Scratch beneath the surface of all chest thumping, song rallying propaganda and rhetoric, and the envy and greed are always there. Always. We can’t unite in peace and love, but almost every nation, race, ethnicity, and gender will get behind mass murder and still show up to pray on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, with no sense of guilt or the least compunction.

And for that and nothing else, generations continue to be sacrificed, both as soldiers and as their victims. As the great Nikki Giovanni put it:

“Ain’t they got no shame?

Nah, they ain’t got no shame.”