Shimma, I really do not understand why these things happened and why they are still happening. I truly do not understand. What causes one group to JUDGE another group as inferior and thereby seek out to destroy them? Why? Where do they get the courage? Do they consider themselves righteous; fighting for a cause by eliminating others? Why do others allow them? I just do not understand.
I am sorry to say that the reason is greed. Rich men who want more money.
So they appeal to ignorance, they appeal to fear, they say, ohh, the Whosits are evil and they want to do bad things to us, so we had better go do some really bad things to them first.
And of course, the winner is the dude who sells the weapons, and the company that makes the weapons, because they can sell them to both sides!
It is not new, it has been that way since cave days, when Ugg the maker of fine axes got the nifty idea that if he could get a fight started between Tribe A and Tribe B...
So the people who do the terrible things do it because they believe something that is not true, but they believe it as if it were something beautiful and good, they trust the people who tell them all about how bad the other side is.
This is why I say that the only way we can possibly fight back is through the most basic Resistance of all - just say it stops with me.
Because once they can get it going, they can keep it going for generations, because we want to avenge our fathers, and then our sons will want to avenge us, and we are not receiving a benefit from that! We are harming our own hearts with it, we are sending our sons to their own deaths with it!
But if we can say, no matter what his father did to mine, I will not kill him. I will not hate him, and I will not teach my sons to hate his sons. It stops with me - if enough of us will say that, even if we have to say it and get out of town, we will be getting out with our families and our lives and our souls, and then if we can keep doing it in the new town, when somebody comes and says this or that (that by now we know just means "rich men want more money") it will be a little easier, and if we are lucky, maybe somebody else will get to know us and say, you know what? It stops with me, too. Or maybe not, but either way, if we can keep hate out of our own hearts, and blood off our own hands, if we can really make it stop with us, then whatever happens, we win.