My two cents

Utter sadness.  Those two words adequately describe my feelings for the last few weeks (they have been hard on me).  Not because of anything in my personal life,  but rather world events.  My soul has been disquieted most by the plights of the Palestinians, and the events in Iraq.  Mostly because I feel helpless; my only contribution to the horrors being the tears I shed daily for the innocents.  My prayers seems to land on deaf ears, my actions seem to make no difference, and hashtags are useless.  My facebook; smothered by the constant onslaught of horrific videos, pictures, testimonials; feeling like I am hurtling through space (wind rushing against my face) unable to catch my breath.
I stand for the people of Palestine and the people of Israel both deserve peace.  Of course I have anger against both governments for having caused the deaths of so many children.  Aside from a few "bad apples" calling for the end of Israel or death to Arabs I wholeheartedly believe most people just want peace.  My personal thoughts are that Israel and Hamas (until the Palestinian people vote them out) need to trust and respect each other.  Yes, that will be VERY hard, but it can be done.  Israel needs to trust that Hamas will not call of Israel's end (as they have removed it form their charter in 2006) and Hamas needs to trust that Israel will end the occupation.  Will that bring forever peace? No, off course not.  Violence and hatred will always exists but the governments need to work together to fight against that and not blame entire peoples.  I.e. no communal punishment. No doubt the events that have taken place in the last few weeks have planted more seeds of terror (see video below).  These children will need to be taken care of and given proper psychological treatment.  We cannot ignore them.  We cannot forget them. Long idea short, both sides just need to STOP.  Count to 3 and STOP. at the same time. The whole Israel/Palestine situation just makes me sad, and frustrated because I feel the solution is easier than most people expect. We just need to stop playing the blame game.
The situation in Iraq makes me just as sad, but ISIS simply pisses me off.  There is nothing more to be said for them other than the fact that ISIS people are a bunch of deranged thugs that need to institutionalized and quarantined.  Is that PC enough? As if blowing kids (Israel) up was not bad enough, beheading them is truly the work of a devil, and deserves a place in the deepest spot of Hell.  Maybe ISIS pisses me off so much because they decided to hijack my faith.  Really, just for that I would send them to Hell.  However, ISIS has gone beyond that they show complete disregard for human life and dignity.  No compassion, no option for compromise, just vicious disregard.  I am not going to blame the emergence of ISIS on forever long disputes between sects or people. Why?  Because I know for a fact that Iraqis of all faiths and cultures have lived together (as neighbors) in peace and will again.  So what caused this?  A power vacuum. That we caused when we invaded Iraq for not good reason.
Yes, Saddam was a terror, a dictator.  But we had no right to remove him.  If the Iraqi people needed liberation from this dictator they needed to rise up on their own volition.  That may have taken a while (even forever), but I would hope that the time it would take the people to rise up against their own dictator they could have worked out plan together (without outside intervention) on what to do after. What would our (USA) possible role have been? Advisers. Not how to topple Saddam but to give advise to NOT topple him until a post Saddam plan was agreed upon. That is it.
Sadly, hindsight is 20/20.  what do we now? We have to advise the Iraqi people to come together to work together, and then stay out of it.  If they want to split into 3 countries then so be it. If they want to stay together than so be it. While that is happening we need to fight militarily with ISIS. We should not add fuel by arming any group. We all know how that ends.  Lets finally learn from our mistakes.  We don't need to un-arm anyone lets not arm them MORE. Why am I not calling any Middle-east country to come to aid?  Well, not that they should not.  But I simply have more confidence in the might and capabilities of my country (America).  I don't trust anyone else to have the guts to follow through (as needed). We can arm and educate a people but we cannot give them guts or a spine to stand in the face of evil and defeat it.

At the end of the day, I am a Mama of two beautiful angels, and I stand for peace.