https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Nw7HbaeWY

First, I heard callings-out from people who don't care about ancient buildings.

"It's an outrage. It's nearly blasphemous! People must do something. How could this have happened?"

Buildings that are old can burn to the ground; with Notre-Dame, the top of the structure was burned down. Hundreds of thousands of bees that lived on the top of the building survived, though, that's good. No human died because of the fire.

Today, Sri Lanka. Over 200 persons are mass-murdered in eight different strikes. Churches are blown up, hotels shattered, the lives of countless individuals transformed forever.

https://twitter.com/MangalaLK/status/1119946052092792832

I remember standing up while in a public restaurant in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. I stood up together with everybody else in that restaurant and a silent minute passed. I felt ashamed and thought nobody had been standing up as former Yugoslavia had been ripped by NATO shells over several years. Madeleine Albright didn't care about the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8

We're solid and we don't need to kick them

This is North, South, East, and Western

https://twitter.com/HayesBrown/status/983030560648986624

It's no real surprise that people in the country where I live, Sweden, bought the American onslaught against "moslem violence" wholesale. Everybody mourned the Americans who died in 9/11, which is completely understandable; what is, au contraire, not understandable, is how we turned our backs completely on mass destruction that has gone on for decades, and still goes on in our world, for example in Congo.

I wrote that blog post, the one I just linked to, almost ten years ago. And nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.

Some people just don't count. They're what Orwell called unpersons.

The population of Congo are, to popular media, unpersons.

They don't exist. There are worthy victims, and then there are unpersons.

Sri Lanka is filled with unpersons, according to popular media.

Imagine what killing tax avoidance could do with us.

Imagine what making sure everybody knows we're all the same could do with us.

Instead, we see what's done to us, or really, to the unpersons. To those who are dying but aren't white.

If we don't stand up for everyone, regardless of their age, where they're from, "gender", or anything else, we're beyond stupid and cynical; it means we're anti-intellectual, which we cannot afford to be.

And if you won't stand up for the people being hurt, please, stand up for what's good in society at the very least; after a while, if you don't stand up for people who hurt, either you won't be helped when you're in pain, or you'll be the last one standing, without anybody else around you, in sickness or in health.