Conflict – we have arrived at a juncture where breaking news is an anticipated breath. Language at times is a propaganda jungle. Circumstantial – a photo of a dead child washed up on a distant shore, a crowd of people after being struck by a truck, the limbs of a human being lying on a stretch of pavement after a bomb, the raised hands of a man saying he is the final authority, the payment through a blue blood’s hands for a judge to sit on a Supreme Court, the money exchanged in the darkness for distribution control of a drug, the back channels of prison profit, the corporate mischief in the shifting arenas of insurance, medicine, food, banking, policing, military and other less visible machinations. And conflict is also can be found in listening to an individual who is a mistress to a Wall Street executive and wondering how she will maneuver through an unsettling obstacle course and not disappear one night.

There are cyclical genocides, wars, bloody battles, crippling diseases and mass starvation, floods, fires, bombs and vehicle crashes, the list is endless with no priorities. We might turn our attention away as a child might cover his or her eyes.

Random occurs and affects our life on some level even when ignored or across the country or on the other side of the globe from it. Our fate is not in our hands this side of suicide or deciding to join a cause in an arena of violence. No one knows with certainty when our last breath will be taken.

Conflict is an opportunity to make money by those selling a product with conflict purposefully generated for the sake of more coins in the coffer or transfer of property, including being laid to rest. Conflict is money as many a politician or executive or judge may attest to, for the sake of whatever and whomever, as well as his or her own personal empowerment and pocketbook. International banks, countries and independent arms dealers have grown extremely rich through conflict with arms deals among other associated products being respectfully profitable.

With little effort one can find hundreds of opportunities to access conflict on the Internet, television, radio or hard print or just listening day-to-day conversations about work and home life or shopping for groceries or medicine while the cost of life rises. Someone is always making money off of a conflict. It appears in diverse forms from fake news to actual events on a city street or between political actors and their funders or a senior being kicked out of his or her home or the veteran that returned from battle and found himself living under a bridge.

Conflict is a natural aspect of life and at times is interlaced with the humane attribute of compassion that one might encounter among strangers and loved ones. Though one must at times step back to recognize it – a kind gesture that begins in the simplest of forms. It’s the courtesy of recognizing you as a human being by another and not to be exploited and degraded by an act of inhumanity.