2015 is coming to a close with a bang and a whimper. The bang of violence across the world beckons and the whimper of those right people who prefer to do the moral thing to make the world better, threatens. However, neither bang nor whimper now has a clear path to an endgame that can not only just win a moment, but change the world.

We always try to live hopeful and uninhibited — be it through faith or reason or just the unaffiliated, preternatural, compunction to safely make it through a dark day back into night — but things are changing all around us. Not just in faraway nations, but right in our local cities and micro neighborhoods.

The threat of danger and violence is more real and tastable than it has ever been, and that’s because we not only celebrate death over negotiation — we honor the most vile among us on television and in social media by giving them free attention and their own personal soapboxes propped up by our adoring eyes and flailing fingers.

Campuses have become crass crucibles where a minority agenda commands majority acquiescence in uneven terms designed to disassemble the crumbling status quo in the most disruptable possible way. To what end? For what goal?

We live in a time when the smallest microaggression can lead to an insovereign assassination over a cigarette. Our emotions now run our moralities.

I find mainstream entertainment reality TV people just as offensive and deadly to our nation as a wild White man with a gun in a closed corridor — and that’s the oddity that is America. We’ve lost our safe spaces and our gentle places to land. We must now always be on alert for every deception and violence imaginable, yet it is only the unimaginable that tends to reach directly inside us as a feral nation for definition.

Terrified people tend to not want to remain frightened. They want action. They want to do something to feel better, and they don’t want to rely on others to react to perceived threats to their safety, so there’s a tendency to want to protect the self inside the family with weapons. Unfortunately, those weapons, in the wrong hands, tend to do more harm to the family unit than to the threat-in-preparation.

How can we assuage and calm a terrified persona? We’re quickly becoming a nation — nay, a world — of undiagnosed, unmedicated, paranoid schizophrenics who see danger around every corner and doom along every bend.

If we are to return to the City on a Hill, we must lose our pinnacles and pitfalls of suspicion and hatred; but I’m not certain that can ever be achieved without some sort of widespread, human, calamity that forces everyone to calm down and reset the terror temperature to zero or risk total annihilation.

I get the strong sense too many people today would rather use violence to solve a problem than to negotiate a fair compromise. That’s a problem moving forward because soon there won’t be anyone left to complain except the dead, the convicted, and the bountied.

What is the solution to our international infestation with death and destruction? With 2016 looming, the New Year doesn’t offer much solace or solution to an everlasting problem. With national elections centered on protectionism — and only the preservation of the unborn life, if you’re breathing on your own, you’re on your own — it seems like we’re going into a whole new year with the same old world of hurt.

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