Two Things

The two things that have been big in the news for the last few days: the missiles that flew at Syria, and the United passenger who didn't fly anywhere.  Seemingly unrelated, but they share in one very important way, regular people are being brutalized by a system that does not care about them.  In the case of Syria, it is those people who were victims of some sort of chemical warfare: civilians, many of them children.  It was horrific enough to make even Donald Trump have a human moment.  Conspiracy theories abound, about why and wherefore chemicals were unleashed, but the excuses and explanations do not matter to those who are dead and suffering.  The cold fact of the matter is that we live in a world where chemical attacks on civilians happen, and we as citizens of that world allow the world to be that way.  We say we can't do anything about it, evil happens, mad dictators happen, international politics are complicated, war is unavoidable and wars have collateral damage.
We are all guilty of the blood of innocents whether we want to admit it or not.  Our lives of convenience have a cost, and we rarely see that cost.  If you were to see what goes on at a slaughterhouse, you would probably be a vegetarian.  We are insulated from the consequences of our consumption and our lifestyles in a way that has never been true in the history of the world, for any but the clueless aristocracy of the gilded age.  Marie Antionette syndrome runs wild through our society, we see these people crushed by the gears of the war machine and we think whatever our particular version of "let them eat cake," happens to be.  For some it is, "Sorry, but you have allowed Muslim extremists in your backyard, too bad for you." For others (mea culpa on this one), it is the notion that we somehow ought to ride to the rescue and save the day.  I generally think that more bombs are really not the answer, but the task of even getting humanitarian aid to the Syrians right now boggles the mind.
We have let systemic violence run the world, and dead children are the consequence of that choice.  We have allowed corporations, which are a part of what Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex become a sort of unknown and unseen driver of our world.  Do you know who benefited the most from Trump Tomahawking Assad?  Raytheon, the company that makes the Tomahawk missiles that cost just shy of two million dollars a piece.  You know who is salivating over another middle eastern country to occupy? Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and any number of other corporations who are going to make a killing (figuratively and literally) on a war.
The fact that United Airlines can get away with forcibly removing a paying customer who had done nothing wrong, using the power and authority of a civil police force is a small time symptom of an enormous problem.  However shocking it may be for us to watch the video of that man being dragged up the airplane aisle, it is a drop in the bucket compared to what enormous corporations like United, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobile and the rest of the murderous profit mongers get away with on a daily basis.
They are degrading our ecosystem, exploiting our labor, robbing our life savings and giving us cancer and the only justification they seem to need is profits for the stockholders and a steadily climbing DOW. I am pretty sure that it's not the Russians, or even Al Quaida that is the greatest threat to our world at this moment, it's corporate greed and the power (legal protection even) we give it run free.
It would behoove us all to wake up to this reality, before it's us who are getting dragged off the plane and before it's our children dead in the streets with their lungs full of Sarin gas.