Why Are the Bad Guys Winning?
It didn't get much international coverage last week or this week but the photo above depicted a truly gigantic event in one of the world's most important capitals -- Bogota, Colombia. It shows thousands of young Colombians wildly celebrating in the streets as they watched a giant television screen that was depicting the signing of an omnipotent peace treaty in Havana, Cuba. It, at least for a time, marks the end of the world's longest and one of the world's bloodiest wars, a Civil War that has raged for five decades pitting the Colombian government against FARC rebels. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Colombians have been killed or maimed. These young Colombians prayerfully wanted it to end, and so did the government of Cuba. For the last four years Cuba has painstakingly brokered peace negotiations that brought the decent President of Colombia, Juan Santos, face-to-face with the leading FARC terrorist guerrillas. Finally, last week in Havana a peace treaty was signed. As always, many powerful people -- including the former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe known for his Bush-dynasty ties -- vigorously oppose this peace treaty, so maintaining it will be difficult. BUT MOST COLOMBIANS, like the young people above, prayerfully applaud it. You see, they want to live out their lives, if possible, in peace...not fear.
Anne Frank, the legendary and precious little Dutch girl, also wanted to live out her life in peace and become an author. Her famed diary, as she and her family tried to hide from the Nazis, revealed she likely would have become both a great author and a great mother. But Anne Frank, her sister and over six million other Jewish citizens were gruesomely murdered before the Holocaust was ended in 1945 by World War II. Now fast-forward from the haunting photo of Anne Frank to today's color photo on the right. This bloodied and traumatized little girl is actually considered lucky by today's insane and ongoing metrics. She's alive while most of her schoolmates were killed by the sophisticated bomb that merely bloodied and terrorized her. The twin photos above are courtesy of the New York Times and also courtesy of the insanity of the world Anne Frank lived in back in the 1940s and the world in which the little girl on the right is trying so desperately to live in today. But like with her dead classmates and millions of other little children, the odds are stacked very high against her. And that's because...it seems...the bad people...in today's world...are either...more powerful...or more motivated...than the good people. That sheer fact includes self-proclaimed good people like me who cry when we study photos of Anne Frank from the 1940s OR when in 2016 we see daily photos or television images like the one of the terrified and bloodied {BUT LUCKY} little girl shown above on the right. And then we wipe the tears away and sit for a few moments in awed silence staring aimlessly and helplessly into a brief and empty space. We wonder why? WHY? But we have no answers. My only hope...and my only miniscule contribution...is that Anne Frank knew as she died that I cared about her AND that the little girl in the color photo as she tries to live knows that I care...about her too. That's not much, I know, but at least it's something. Just caring...is something...isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it? ISN'T IT...?
I love you, Anne Frank.
And for many years, I believed your most famous quotation.
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