Dear Humanity,

As I have gotten older, I have come to make one major realization in my life. This discovery was very troubling and is hard to live with. Recently, I have taken a class intended to teach me about the Holocaust, but it has taught me more about our world, life, and more about myself in nine weeks than the previous 16 years of my life. What this course has come to teach me is that we, as a species, suck. There’s no other way to put it. We are sick, twisted creatures driven by greed and hate. I can’t speak for everybody, but I know I can speak for a lot when I say that something needs to change. And so I write this, to be a voice and an advocate for change. If reading this makes you see things a little differently, reconsider your life choices, or think about how you have treated someone, then I have done my job.

I am a human, a human living in an inhumane world. You too, are a human living in an inhumane world. How can human be the root of humane, yet it is humans who are most often inhumane? Are we no more than beasts?  Humans killing other humans, just as the beast kills his brethren. Forcing humans away from their home, into territory unfamiliar to them, with no sense of remorse. Humans walking into schools with an AK-47 and slaughtering the people that they grew up with. And we’re supposed to be the superior species? It is not our language, nor is it our opposable thumbs that make us superior, but it is our hearts and our brains that make us superior to the beast. So how is it humans can forget that we have a heart? How can we forget to use our brains? How do we murder, rape, steal, or commit genocide? Worse yet, how do we stand by and let other humans do the raping? The murdering? The uprooting and tearing apart of families? The genocides? Are we no more than beasts? No, I am a human. You are a human. We are all humans, and we are all the same, regardless of skin color, religion, rich or poor. Does that stop them? Does it stop you? Does it stop us from standing by as the Syrian government murders its own people? Does it stop a terrorist from driving a truck into a crowd of people or detonating his bomb?  Does it stop the American government from making laws a little stricter and saving the lives of the future? No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t stop anybody from taking action, yet nobody does. Why? Because it’s easier to turn a blind eye than it is to lend a hand. The right thing - the human thing - isn’t always the easy thing to do, and for that reason it doesn’t get done. It needs done and somebody has to do it. So, from this moment forward, I’m taking a stance.