Where is the love?

Two years ago I spend four months studying abroad in the city of London. What was just supposed to be a semester in a foreign country, turned out to be some of the best months of my life. It was an amazing cultural experience - I had never been out of the country (save for a trip through Canada) before then - and a time of self discovery. I made amazing new friends and fell in love with everything British. And to this day, London is my favorite city in the whole world (sorry NYC).

And then today happened. And it just broke my heart. Today London was attacked. In case you didn't read about it, a man driving a SUV drove his car straight into pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge and then stabbed and killed a police officer outside Parliament. So far, five people are dead and 40 are wounded. This isn't the first terrorist attack in a major city in the past year. Let's see, there's Paris, Brussels (today's attack actually happened on the 1st anniversary of this attack, BTW), Nice, Berlin, and Jerusalem, just to name a few.

I really don't understand. I just don't understand how there can be so much hatred in the world. Yes there are plenty of people out there that I don't like, and I'm sure that there are plenty of other people out there that you don't like either, but I understand that everyone is different and that I'm not always going to agree with their beliefs. And just because I don't agree with them, it doesn't mean I hate them or want to harm them in any way. I can't hate someone I haven't even met before. Even if we grow up different and look at life differently, we still hold the same things close to us: family, friends, religion (or lack thereof), and of course our values.

We just need to remember that we are all human. The only real difference between anyone is perspective. Where you live, where you grew up, who is prominent in your life, what injustices you have been subjected to - those things all shape our perspective on what the rest of the world is really like, even if we've been stuck in only one spot our whole lives. We will never fully understand the perspective of another person unless we live with them and really get to know them. And even then we will still never completely understand because we can never be inside someone else's brain.

I feel like right now people are looking at life through a straw, seeing only the things they want to and turning a blind eye to everything else. And then if they see something new and it's nothing like they've seen before, they decide they don't like it and do they're best to shoot it down (quite literally). We need to instead look at life through a wide angle lens, taking everything in and appreciating all it's beauty, however foreign.

After all, we are all more alike then we actually think we are. Only .1 percent of human DNA varies between person to person, blood related or not. And I think that's something we need to always remember. We are more alike than different. We are more alike than different. We are more alike than different.