The cry for blood cannot be sated with more violence. It only grows.

There can be no winner here. Resist the urge to pick up the flag and rally around one group or the other. This sadness is one of the many rewards for our collective carelessness in the treatment of millions of lives. We have all helped to plant the seeds of hopelessness and despair, and we have watered them with endless inaction and platitudes. Finally, we reap our harvest of sorrows.

Resist the shock, resist the outrage, resist the jingoistic cries of solidarity. What we must do now is steady ourselves, and stand with the innocents. The choices we make now are of the utmost importance. We as the people of the United States have one simple job to do: resist the reductionist outrage. We cannot allow this single event to harden us to the suffering of humans, wherever those humans happen to live. We must keep the conflict in our minds as messy and complicated as it truly is, however much it hurts to do so, and slowly, carefully we as a nation must help to pick up the pieces.

My heart for the people Israel. My heart for the people of Palestine. My heart for the innocents.

Do you remember, as a child, taking a set of dominoes and standing them up end on end next to each other, and then tipping the first over and watching with unrestrained glee as they all come tumbling down? No? That may only be me, but I’m sure you get the concept. It’s all cause and effect: the first domino knocks over the second, and the second the third, and so on.

What does this have to do with politics?

Especially in America, we like to believe we are that shining city on the hill, impervious to anything else that happens in the world. We want to be independent, above all else, and sometimes this desire is so strong and so pervasive that it deludes us into believing that we actually can be. But, no matter what we might want to believe, the truth is that there is no such thing as an independent nation in the modern world. The truth is that if a war breaks out in, say, Ukraine, then the oil prices rise in the United States. Now that we’ve got gas prices under control, it’s tempting to push the narrative that our concerns in Ukraine have somehow diminished, but that would be farther from the truth. In Africa, right now, there’s a hunger crisis that’s linked to the Ukraine war.

This is the truth: we are all interconnected. There are no islands, and there is no way to disentangle if we wish to maintain our envied lifestyles here in the states. And if we’re not feeling the war in Ukraine yet in any real way here in the states, don’t worry…it’s coming. And that famine? 1.3 million people are fleeing their homes because of it, and they all have to go somewhere.

As prices keep going up, we need to remember how to prioritize. Inflation is global and Biden is delivering on the infrastructure programs that we need to build this country. Biden doesn’t control inflation as many might think.

And if we’re tracking inflation, we should really talk about Turkey (79% inflation). And there’s a war in Ukraine so food supplies are short worldwide. All of these issues impact inflation here at home. Further, there’s a global oil market, so there’s not much that Biden can do about oil other than what he’s been doing.

What can he help with? Building our national infrastructure, and putting blocks in place to diminish the ability of people to interfere with our elections going forward. Biden can help a lot when it comes to fighting fascism. When it comes right down to it though, the power belongs to the people. You and I, how we vote and who we talk to about the current state of politics is a huge factor in the upcoming political fights.

It’s time to prioritize. To fascism or not to fascism?