Peace, hope and faith

Across the world the threat of extreme religious sects are causing a great deal of violence. How and why these groups have become a reality is very clear to those that are strong enough to understand the reality of our actions. Basically a person acts violently because they have lost hope in the current leadership, lost control of themselves to be peaceful and their faith in peace has been destroyed. Moving from the basic ideology to the complex, the cold war mentality has allowed groups to play off the Permanent Five members of the United Nations Security Council (P5). In this reality people have lost faith in peaceful means because of the inability of the world leaders to work together and act peacefully. In truth there is no one starting point to say that was where everything went wrong. However the world had its best opportunity to bring peace after World War II. This point in time has made the Middle East a hot bed of hatred. From there we have many Central and South American states in perpetual civil war, African countries in turmoil, many Balkan states have been at war, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other areas impacted by the division of the Permanent Five members of the United Nations Security Council (P5). To get very pointed, the use of Viktor Bout is a clear example of how the P5 have allowed wars to rage on. Again the illegal invasion of Iraq is another example of the P5 lack of peaceful leadership. More recently the situation in Ukraine is now playing out in the cold war mentality. Sadly the leaders do not pay the price of their idiocy. They sit there a wonder why youth are joining groups like the Islamic State. With the situation in Ukraine we know the western countries supported the initial coup attempt, which went out of control. Now the entire situation is being blamed on Russia. Although Russia has been supporting rebels, would this situation even be taking place if the initial coup was not started by western nations? Even though that question is there, answering it is not important because it has no bearing on replacing the peace in Ukraine. Letting go of such answers to place blame is the foremost urgent need. In reality we are all to blame equally. This is where the hope and faith in a peaceful world must come in. We must realize that acting with violence has not brought peace in almost every war that has taken place. Killing each other certainly will not work in the Ukraine, Middle East or other places. What we are left with is the method which brings every war to an end - negotiations. From there we must take great steps to teach the next generation to act with faith in peace. Teaching the next generations to act with such faith in peace is our only hope to realize peace. Each of us must take courageous steps to forgive past wrongs and not to seek blame. For peace to take hold we need a strong show of faith and hope that peace is possible.