Hateful

I hope by now you know what Aleppo was, a city in Syria, an ancient city, at one time a bustling and beautiful city.  It's not that any more, now it's a pile of rubble and the site of an on-going failure of our common humanity.  Not a war, not a rebellion, a travesty against our dignity as a species.  I hate what is happening in Aleppo right now.  As I grow older I am trying to reserve the word hate for very special occasions.  I used to hate a lot of things.  I used to hate certain kinds of food, and lots of kinds of music, none of that really deserved my hate. What is going on in Aleppo right now is worthy of hate.
I hate that the situation has seemed so inevitable and unsolvable.  I hate that the only thing anyone living in our comfortable, stable world can think to do is to throw some money at the problem.  If you can, you should give somewhere, some how, but that doesn't get us off the hook.  By us, I mean all of humanity.  We should be capable of doing better than this.  The failure of our potential is what I really hate.  This kind of thing doesn't happen because of the madness of individuals, we have lived with comic book villains and Darth Vader a little too long.  This is not about Bashar al Assad, or Vlad Putin or a violent mastermind, this happens because we, collectively, allow it to happen.  We feel powerless, we feel like it's just too big of a problem, we feel like we don't understand well enough what causes catastrophes like Syria to erupt into horror.
But we do, we absolutely know.  There are only a few things in the world that cause all of this sort of vileness.  It is the vicious, self-maintaining cycle of money, power and violence that is at the heart of all of our problems, everything else is secondary or tertiary.  Greed leads some to take more than their share, and leave others without enough.  Hunger, poverty and insecurity ensue and those who suffer eventually threaten, with the power of numbers and desperation, to rise up and demand something more.  Power then becomes necessary to "defend" those who have become accustomed to their privilege and comfort.  Power uses violence to accomplish its ends.  If the violence can be simply through some combination of political ideology, religious conditioning, suppression of dissent, or the maintenance of some sort of detente based on the threat of physical violence, maybe you can have some sort of peace.  Eventually though, the threats must be shown to be real, or the hungry bellies will rise up and demand a reckoning.  Then the demons come out to play, as they have been in Syria and Iraq.
Don't pretend you don't know what causes this.  Also, don't pretend you don't know the antivenom. We have lived with the prescription for this problem for so long, it's absolutely staring us in the face.  It is the foundation of the Law, the Prophets and the Gospel, it is the antidote for the toxic cycle of greed, power and violence.  You know what the Lord requires: "Do justice, Love Mercy and walk humbly with your God," that's how the Hebrew Prophet Micah says it.  Jesus says: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."  Paul, building on Jesus' foundation says he will show us "a more excellent way:" Faith, Hope and Love (the greatest is love).  Love that counteracts the greed and pushes us towards kindness and charity (an expansive and gracious spirit, not just gifts of pity) to others, hope that shows us what real power really is and faith that will help us refrain from reacting violently when we feel threatened.
I'm not suggesting that the solution is for everyone to become Christians (or any other religion for that matter), that won't solve it.  This stuff happens among those who profess faith of some sort as much, if not more, than among the godless. I'm suggesting that we know the solution to the problem, we just have decided not to pay it any mind.  That's what I really hate.  It's like we have the directions neatly tucked away in our pocket as we rage and ruin what we would be able to build if we just followed the plan.
I'm tired of the hand wringing and the futile lamentation that always follows such catastrophes.  We have been told how to solve the problem, but for a myriad of reasons, which we delude ourselves into believing are beyond our ability, we keep running on the hamster wheel of power, violence and greed, and we keep repeating the same tragic mistakes over and over again.
So go ahead, give to the charity, put the bandaids on the wounds, mourn the tragedy, and then go right back into the stupid, blind and hateful cycles of all those things that we tell ourselves can't be changed.  As long as we keep telling ourselves how unavoidable it all is, we are pretty much guaranteed that it will never end.