Normally I try to come up with as witty of a title as possible, but there’s no place for wit today. When the marathon bombing happened, I saw the best of humanity. I saw people running to help others though they knew another bomb could explode and kill them. That didn’t matter; they wanted to save lives and help. We stuck together and caught the guilty parties. We saluted and applauded our men and women of the law for their hard work in keeping us safe as if they were celebrities. They were not celebrities, all these heroes for their courage in such a dark time in our state. Did I mention we caught the guilty parties? This distinction comes into play later on, I promise.

After all this, I realized that soon I’d see the end of this amazing humanity. I’d start to see the worst in it, and it made me lose all that faith in people that I had gained. I was naïve, I admit. I should have known better. I saw in the news about a Muslim woman getting harassed and smacked around and yelled at “You caused the bombings! Terrorist!”, all because she was Muslim. A friend, that though I haven’t spoken to in years but still have great respect for, had her work’s windows smashed in because her and her family are Muslim. All because humans are hateful creatures. This hate against them is no different than the hate radicals have against us. I’ll probably get hate mail for saying this, but really who has the right to make that distinction that one version of hate is any better than the other? Both “haters” cause violence on innocent people. It’s sickening.

The people who did this to our state were caught. They were radical terrorists that happened to be Muslim. All Muslims are not terrorists. Are all white people terrorists because we have a few bad seeds that bomb innocent people? Then why do we consider all Muslim people terrorists because they have bad seeds too? Muslims probably look at terrorists the same way Christians look at the Westboro Baptist Church, they acknowledge the evil they preach under the guise of religious purity but refuse to be associated with them.

Hate is a terrible thing. Hate is just a cycle, one bad deed followed by a dozen more. The way to prove you are truly better than those who cause harm is to get the bad guys and leave the innocent ones alone. We can’t keep generalizing everyone in one group of “bad guys”, because every group has bad guys in it and I refuse to believe everyone on this planet is a bad guy.