You Won But Did You Really
By Bernadette A. Moyer

When you have to kill and to destroy to make your point, have you won? Really won? I have been relatively quiet since the recent mass murders in San Bernardino California; however I have read much and processed much about this subject since it happened.

What argument or disagreement or different way of thinking and living merits mass murder? As a woman and as a mother I think the hardest part for me to process is how any young mother could willingly destroy lives and risk their own life and in doing so leave their six-month old baby behind?

Seems so very selfish to have a child and then take actions that will virtually ensure they will have lost their father and their mother due to their choice of terrorism. To kill innocent people just because they don’t think and believe like you do, over an ideology over a belief in a different God?

Then I think about people that don’t take a life but kill other relationships and other people so that they can get their way, selfishly at the expense of other people. People that lie and people that manipulate and people that willingly play the victim because their need to win and to be right is much more important to them than the well-being of others and for peace and love.

When the mission is purely to destroy, there are no winners. Who won in California? The people who killed innocent people are dead and their child is left without parents. That same anger and hatred that this young female terrorist used to destroy lives, that same amount of energy and that same amount of passion could just as easily been used to better her community and her family and her baby’s life.

A choice was made to destroy …

A choice was made to kill innocent people …

People’s lives are destroyed every day by the actions of other people, it happens in families; it happens on the job, it happens in a community. When the individual need to be right, when a group of people believe that their faith and way of thinking is superior to all others, who really is the winner here?

Whatever decisions we face in life, I would be willing to bet if it starts with hatred and with anger and with a willful desire to hurt others, it can’t possibly be good for anyone nor can it render a winner.

“Anger is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.” Mitch Albom from The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The terrorist actions they don’t make me want to stop going out or to go to public places but it does make me look closely at other people and their behaviors. It makes me less willing to openly embrace people I don’t know and I find myself saying to myself, “there are a lot of crazy, sick and hate-filled people in this world.”

A sad statement I know but then again there were no winners when terrorist attack and it doesn’t matter to me who the terrorist is and where they come from as much as the fact that it comes from another human being, and the harsh reality of how horribly some people, another human being is willing to go to treat other people so hatefully and with such callousness and cruelty …

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