#JeSuisCharlie The words are ringing out around the world.  I am numbed by the events of the last week. Not angered, not impassioned, just numbed. France, plastered all over the world's media, Nigeria near to ignored. Maybe it's compassion fatigue. Maybe I'm just sick of humans being bloody idiots. I have no comprehension that people can justify their hate, their violent insanity with some sense of offense on behalf of a long dead prophet, who if he was as prophetic and wise as they believe would probably not have condoned their violence in the first place. 

I have a sense that sometimes the anger of the worlds extremists is just too much..is there no answer to their hate, to their wrongheadedness, to their ignorance.

I find myself wondering if their anger is the fallout from the catapulting of ancient cultures into modernity. Is this what happens when a culture skips the age of enlightenment and is catapulted wholesale out of subsistence life in adobe villages into a world of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll and the internet?

These extremists stand at the border between a modern and an ancient world, with a foot in each, and with a fundamentally flawed view, belonging in neither the ancient world or the modern. They live not the simplistic lives of the old traditions nor the secular life of the new.  Meanwhile, the western world breeds a kind of regression where leaders of the western world unlearn the lessons of the enlightenment...

Or is this what happens when the Global North, wholesale, whether by good intentions or bad, mistreats the Global South? Is this violence fuelled by ongoing millitary interventions; by the negative effects of dodgy free trade deals and trade sanctions; by the wreckage of colonial political architectures; by the ongoing sanctioning of the behaviour of Israel toward Palestinians, by decade upon decade of interventions in one way or another of the Global North into the Global South. Is this all the unseen hand which stokes the fires of ignorance and hate, a malignancy deeper than the offense of religious disrespect?

For the first time I find myself shaking my head and throwing my arms up in the air. What to do. Which way out of this age old mess. How to protect the innocents, and even those that aren't so much innocent as ignorant or naiive? Or even those that are brave?

How to turn the attention of these angry people to the more important things like the future of life on this planet?

**If you are unsure what this post is about...I refer you to or friend google. Google 2000 dead in Nigeria, Google #Je Suis Charlie, Google 'Global North and Global South".