The End of 2014. Well, Almost.

2014 is coming to a close. Its not been a great year. What with MH370 vanishing into thin air; another Malaysian Airlines flight getting shot down in Ukraine; the crisis in Ukraine; Boko Haram abducting schoolgirls in Nigeria; the death of Robin Williams; the outbreak of the Ebola virus; the terror that ISIS spread around the world with their executions of journalists and aide workers; the Israel-Palestine conflict; the Ferguson shooting and the violence that followed; the protests in Hong Kong; the gang rape and murder of two teenage girls from a village in Uttar Pradesh; the cowards who didn't have the courage to stand up for the two sisters in a bus in Rohtak; the ferry that capsized in South Korea; the 20 year old girl who was gang raped by 12 people on the orders of the head of the village and of course, the most recent massacre of children in Peshawar.
It hasn't been a good year for the world. Of course, there were some moments of joy, moments of happiness; moments of humanity. Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. The social experiment in Canada after the attack on Parliament hill in Ottawa. Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. There have been moments when the times didn't seem so bleak. But they are bleak, aren't they? As much as we would like to live in our pretty little homes with the outside world shut out so that we can never get hurt, it's getting to be quite impossible. Terror is everywhere. Evil is everywhere. Tragedy lurks in every corner. But we ignore it. We're content in our little bubbles. Those bubbles were meant to pop. And when they do, you fall hard.
But how can one ignore the events of 16th December? How can one pretend not to shudder at the evil that lurks in the hearts of mankind? How can one's heart not be filled with sympathy for those parents who lost their innocent children at the hands of the Taliban? However much we can compartmentalise and avoid, nobody could ignore this. This unspeakable act of violence. Innocent children. They'd barely lived. They hadn't seen the world. They were bright-eyed, little boys and girls just waiting to grow up. And that was taken away from them. Even the ones who weren't killed have to live with the violence that they witnessed. They took away their childhood. The monsters stole their innocence. WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO? So much violence, so much grief, so much...
There's a little more than a week left for the year to end. Here's to a better, safer and a more humane 2015.