Here's a question I wonder if my mom could answer: Where is Syria? Oh seriously. Of course
I know where Syria is. See what I did there with that little wordplay?
So I wanted to take a break from the normal Stuff Mom Never Told You lineup of fun and
hopefully educational frivolity to talk for a minute seriously about Syria. For starters
where is this Syria that everybody is talking about? As everybody knows Syria is a country
in Western Asia about the size of the state of Washington and it borders the countries
Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran and Israel. Did I not teach you geography in home school?
So chances are if you've even just seen a newspaper or listened to few seconds of the
radio or watched any news on television you have seen something or heard something about
Syria. In a nutshell there is a two-year civil war that's been going on within the country
and most recently there's really strong evidence that the Syrian government used chemical weapons
against it's own people. President Obama and the United States government are deciding
whether or not they are going to militarily intervene in the country because in terms
of the modern rules of warfare, using chemical weapons is not okay. But I don't want to talk
about the politics of Syria, I don't want to talk about whether we should or shouldn't
intervene but it actually matters that we pay attention. There are more than 2 million
refugees that have fled Syria just to get away from all of the violence that's going
on. To put that in a little bit of perspective, hurricane Katrina displaced 1.5 million Americans
out of a nationwide population of over 300 million. So thinking about 2 million refugees
fleeing Syria out of a population of only 22 million, that is a massive group of people
who are just leaving. Not to mention all of the people who are still in the country who
have been displaced from their homes. A vast majority of those people are women and children.
The United Nations estimates that around 100,000 civilians have been killed as a result of
this ongoing civil war. I know that these are dismal numbers to throw your way and I
know that this isn't a hilarious jokey viral video that you want all of your friends to
watch, but those are millions of lives that are being effected and in order to be good
citizens in your own backyards and your own communities, I think it's really to be aware
of the communities and the lives that you can't see, that aren't necessarily immediately
effecting you. Take a moment to imagine what it must be like to live in a country where
you don't know whether or not your apartment building is going to be bombed, you might
not know where you're going to sleep that night, you don't know what is going to happen
to your entire government, the chaos and the instability that that would breed, it probably
also is going to put a lot of things about your own day-to-day in perspective. And it's
so easy to distract ourselves away from these uncomfortable global conflicts that are going
on by talking about Miley Cyrus twerking or watching some cute animal video. And those
kind of distractions aren't bad it's just important that we aren't always distracted.
So I just wanted to take a little YouTube timeout to encourage all of you and to remind
myself to pay attention to the world beyond our own backyards, to still have an interest
even in the grislier side of the world, to better understand not just how we live here
but how all of us live together. As always I want to hear from you as well, if you would
like me to talk about more newsy types of things and such like that, as PhillyD might
say, um let me know in the comments. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks y'all.