There’s crazy shit happening in the world, incomprehensibly evil acts of terrorism from an organization determined to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the Earth.

We, as a planet, cannot stand for this bone-chilling injustice.

Countless human beings have been affected by the terrorist group Hamas, killed, people like me, like you, kids, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents; around the world we continue living our lives.

There’s a pervasive feeling of helplessness… What can, and should, we do? 

It’s a clear, blue, cool autumn day here in Japan. Yet I feel this shadow, this weight, and I write this because I’m trying to make sense of it.

I’m safe. I continue going about my day and for a moment I forget that parts of the planet are on fire. That’s a luxury.

Part of me feels guilty; we don’t have to think about the rest of the world if we don’t want to. Shit, most of us got enough on our plate.

Then an image comes to mind of what’s taking place at this very moment in the Middle East. Innocent souls being taken on both sides of this conflict, both Palestinian and Israeli. It breaks my heart and I can’t ignore it.

Perhaps it’s a decades old, century old, millennia old conflict; for many of us around the world, this conflict is unfathomable.

For others, it’s everyday life.

And while these wars are anything but black and white, politics isn’t the point; people are out there hurting and my heart breaks for them. The horrors enacted by Hamas against both Israelis and Palestinians are beyond words.

When I wonder, is there actually anything I can do? 

How can I be of service, a force for change in the world? 

How is our planet seriously going to heal? 

For most of us, the answer isn’t go fight in the Middle East. 

Perhaps it’s doing nothing more than opening our eyes. Really, fucking, opening our eyes. How are we living our lives? 

There’s no doubt that genuine evil is alive and well in our modern world, just as it was throughout all of human history.

We think we’re past that, that we as individuals are better than that; we could never be what human beings were and are at their lowest, their cruelest.

But we’re human too.

Living in Nazi Germany, chances are we’d do what we were told and be a guard at a death camp if that meant saving our own ass; as much as we’d like to believe it, it’s very unlikely we’d be the German hiding Jews in their cellar, the most courageous thing anybody could have done.

That would mean putting our own lives on the line to stand up to evil, which many are actually out there doing today; we must honor them.

We must know our history, how something like the Holocaust derived from one man, one group’s prejudiced hatred of a people, just as one group’s hatred of a people is tearing us apart today.

How can we not see this? 

What we have, what we’ve always had, is a choice, the most important we can ever face: Hate, or Love.

I share my words, I hope and believe, to show solidarity with anybody hurting, to show you that no matter where we are in the world we’re all just people and we care, even if we don’t truly understand what you’re enduring.

We don’t need to understand to feel love for other human beings.

We don’t need to understand exactly what others are going through to step up and be a friend, a kind person, a force of light in a world that seems, right now, as dark and heavy as could be.

It’s our trivial, everyday acts of kindness and love which direct the future of humanity.

That’s what we can do — we can be good to the people around us. We can continue spreading love in whatever ways we can, because the world fucking needs it.

I hope from the bottom of my heart that you feel love in these words, that you can stay strong and carry on whoever you are, that you can find peace in your heart and soul and seek love, be the love, when the world tells you to hate, not just those pitted in barbaric atrocities, but anybody, just living life and trying — striving — to persist.

Be good to people. Show them you love them. Tell them. Stand up for them and what is right.

This is what’s beautiful about our modern world and social media — we are all connected if we choose to be — real people who struggle behind these screens which so often divide us.

We must come together and stand up against evil, against hate, with every act of love we can muster right where we are today.

My heart beats for you, anybody out there hurting.