With a hectic month of work and trying to find time to complete the novel, I have completed the NaNoWriMo challenge. At 50,444 words, the “Science of Suicide” is complete. Next up is the beginning of the editing process, which I will wait a few days to start tackling. I need to not look at this novel after working on it daily since Nov. 1st. It was close though, I completed it at 8 a.m. on November 31st. Hopefully soon I’ll get to report that it is up for sale and begin trying to hock that one in addition to  my other 3 eBooks that are currently for sale. Until then, I can officially begin adding this back into my rotation.

I’m not sure which story got sensationalized more by the media: Ferguson or Ebola. I don’t know the facts on Ferguson, so I can’t say who I feel was in the right during the situation that occurred. Why? Because every news outlet seems to have a different account as to what actually happened, bending information as always to suit whatever agenda they are pushing on their viewers. Increasingly so, their viewers (on both sides of the aisle) are just becoming mouth pieces that recite information back to everyone else as if it were fact. I can tell you who is in the wrong though: the violent protestors and anyone who encourages them. I’m not going to feign outrage over this because every day someone is killed by another for an injustice and no one seems to care… until it fits an agenda.

What about that body of a missing girl they just found? How about we protest her? Or what about the former Cake drummer that just got put away for 15 years to life for sexually assaulting a 3-year-old girl? Let’s start a protest about that? I’m not buying into anyone’s outrage over this. The fact of the matter, so eloquently put by people like Pharrell Williams, is why aren’t we addressing why a kid would think it’s okay to behave like that or why you should stop when a cop tells you to? Then another point that was thrown out by Joe Scarborough about how we cling onto the wrong poster children, like people saying that George Zimmerman was a hero for what he did only to find out that he really was just trouble all along. The media picks and chooses these people to push an agenda, but why not use positive people fighting for causes. What happened to applauding people like Rose Parks, who did one simple act and became a hero for change in America? What about Gandhi, who was all for peaceful protest to make change? The keys in both of these actual heroes is in how they went about change: through peace.

We don’t have these true heroes anymore, at least none that the media cares to share with the world. Is there still racism in America? Absolutely. The only people who don’t think that are privileged white people with their heads in the clouds, listening to news organizations saying that all races are equal in America. They ignore it when a local Muslim gets ransacked because of a terrorist attack, and then blame it on them for “not speaking out against their radicals”. They make comments about how that new Muslim family in the neighborhood are sleeper cell terrorists. They ignore the fact that a person does get racially profiled while driving or at the airport. Let’s consider this: the people responsible for the Boston marathon bombing were white. They did not look like the stereotypical Muslim. So, why aren’t white people checked as thoroughly as a person with color in their skin when going through the airport? There would be outrage if that occurred. So if you are so convinced that racism doesn’t exist in America, you need to start looking around in the real world because eventually those clouds are going to pop.

Certainly, it is not as bad as it used to be. No one is arguing with that. But hate still exists, and even the simplest comment about a person being a sleeper terrorist because someone looks like they could be a Muslim is disgusting no matter how you put it. Because that white family that just moved in could be just as likely to commit an act of terrorism, as we have seen. The minute we stop hating, racism will no longer exist. Unfortunately, people do hate. It is not a war where you need to be on the black or white side, it’s a war on people. We need to start accepting each other, whether we’re white or Asian or black or blue or green. We all have bad people with our skin color or religion, and that does not make us special.