The Toronto Sun had today the following picture as a headline:

Toronto Sun Cover

How the rest of the article went I guess everybody can imagine.

So here we are. Sitting at Tim Horton’s, look at events half a world away and judge people as monsters.

Sure, up to 500 people died, the media is bringing us every single moment of it. We can’t really escape it.

We as the west like to think of our self as “enlightened” and “better”, as a society that values human life above everything else.

Let me comment this in one word: Bullshit

We like to think that we are better, we look at news like this and think “how could they?” We like to think of ourseleves as a society that could never ever commit such crimes. In fact, most of us have all but forgotten what we (as in the west) did not even 80 years ago in Europe, and are doing in other parts of the world even today. We think that we value human life as precious, as something that we have to fight to protect (and kill if necessary), but just have a look at your criminal code and you will realize that even we, the “enlightened” ones, value property higher than the life of another human being. Be it your neighbour, or a stranger.

We have bought ourselves free from such problems. We can ignore them, yet we are still the same human beings as those terrorists, hostage takers, murderers and , well if you have to say it, monsters.

The only difference between them and us is that we have our SUVs, our “clean homes” our “stable societies” in which we have well defined rules about what we can do and cannot do, while they live in a world in which there is no rule, where there are no SUVs and Starbucks.

We have moved our primal instincts into computer games, TV Shows and Movies. Our power struggle has moved from fighting over food into the companies where we “try to get ahead”. We have traded the hunt for food into a hunt for pieces of paper or a column of ones and zeros. We look at our own pervesity in the news and we glimpse at the “others” the “savages” and “monsters” and silently congratulate ourselves that we are not one them.

We have bought ourselves free from those “problems” from the fight for surivival, from the idea that we have to use force to get our ideas heard and our lives bettered.

The only problem is: We aren’t the one footing the bill. It is (in large parts) those “savages” that pay the price so that we can barrel down the highway in our five ton SUV or go to the local supermarket and buy Oranges in the middle of Winter.

It is them who have to suffer for our politics that allow us to live in “peace” and without suffering.

Once in a while our conscience might blip up, at which point we head out and donate something to a charity, thinking we are doing what we can.

But how long would this last? How long would we be the heros and not turn into monsters when we lose the SUV, the Starbucks Coffee, Electricity? How long would it last when our existance would be threatened by another entity, when our cultural identity would be suppressed? How long would it take to pick up arms, to seize control of a school, hospital, any public space to make our voices heard?

The monsters who killed almost fivehundred people are the same people as you and I. And in the irony that is the human existance: If we wouldn’t be watching, if we wouldn’t be wanting to call them monsters while calming our own conscience, these monsters might not have done what they did.

Because you see: The monster is in all of us, and if they cannot come out themseleves, they at least want to watch other monsters at work.

And deep down, we all know it.

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