"Just give peace a chance", that’s just one of the outcries that echo from a good chunk of the US population in regards to its modern state. It also happens to be the crappiest song John Lennon ever wrote. While I like the idea of peace just as much as the next person, and personally am a big fan of Lennon, I live in reality. A reality where I know that the conflicts that have plagued the nations and civilizations of the past will always continue as it is the nature of man. I understand that God gave man a hand to hold and grasp his child, just as he gave his hand the ability to make a fist. It is in the nature of man to fight and conquer, as it is with any creature our race has descended from. While I am not simplifying man as some form of beast, I will not be as arrogant to deny evolution.

Many will argue against this view, asserting that the human race is civilized, that such recent gains as civil rights indicate a strong advancement in human ideology that far surpasses that of our prejudice ancestors. And with this opinion, I am in total agreement. We as a human civilization are advancing exponentially towards social perfection, rid of injustice. It is not hard to look back centuries or even decades ago to see how we, as a race, are bettering ourselves.

However, “we” does not mean “all”. Today the world is made up of many people, all very different. There are those who live in the modern world, which are those of us who have the ability to read this very blog on a computer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are those who can’t even read. And of course there are many who lie between these two extremes. The point is that there are many people, who do not live in our modern world; they in fact live in a distant world, one we don’t understand. This people do not live in our society, they do not follow our rules, they are in fact anomalies, ones we cannot control with diplomacy or words.

They live in many forms; we see them everyday on television. They are those in Ethiopia whose stomachs balloon to outrageous size, they are those in South America who live in shacks, and they are those in the Middle East who tout guns and the Quran. These are factors that lie outside of societies’ bounds. They cannot be controlled, especially those who possess power.