This week’s collective tragedies seems to have put us against the ropes. We are like Mohammed Ali on an off night. We’re up against the ropes, both arms blocking the punches to our face, hoping like hell we don’t fall to the mat and stay out for the count.

That’s not the world I grew up in. I refuse to live in fear. And more important, I won’t give into the constant pleas to give in to ignorance and hate those who are fighting against us.

Don’t get me wrong here. ISIS is a demon. Its foot soldiers are soul-less, heartless machines who don’t know honor or courage. They kill innocents. They commit unspeakable atrocities. And now that their backs are against the wall, they are acting out worldwide, trying to get us to give in to hate so that they can win in the end.

If you read their manifesto, their ultimate goal is to eliminate all the gray in the Muslim world. They want the Muslims of the world to be forced to choose sides. They want it to be “us” against “them.” Christians and westerners against the Muslim people. They want their holy war.

If you listen to the media lately, they are winning getting what they want. Ignorance is being spread like a wildfire, or worse, a plague, through social media. We are quick to lump all Muslims into ISIS. They’re all the same; they are all out to get us.

They aren’t. All religions, all belief systems, have zealots. There are zealots on the right and left of our own political system. There are anarchists, and KKKers, and those who claim the government is out to get our guns or turn us into a nation of godless peoples. I could go on and on. Some of them, even some in our own country – born and raised Americans – have committed unspeakable atrocities to advance their own beliefs.

While we obsess about 9/11, we seem to always overlook the Oklahoma bombing. Step back in the Time Machine to 1995. Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and their hard-on about the federal government and Waco. In a single, horrific moment, 168 lives were snuffed out and 680 more were injured. Killed by our own people – Americans.

In this day and age, bad things happen. There are those who want to use the media and now social media to advance their causes. And let’s face it, writing a manifesto or a single shootout doesn’t get much coverage these days. Each act has to be more vicious, more jarring and more atrocious than the last one, in part because we are becoming jaded. We aren’t shocked by mass killing anymore. It’s just part of life in the western world we live in. It has long been a part of the lives of others around the world, from the IRA bombings in England to the near continuous strife along the Gaza strip. And now it’s in our own backyard.

It’s not going to go away any time soon. It fills the air time for CNN and Fox. They can manipulate us into obsessing about all the violence. It sells newspapers. It increases hits on Facebook. Smartphone startups are creating apps that are designed to aid terrorism, complete with messages that self-erase or are encrypted to the point where even the company that developed them can’t read them.

And yet, we do nothing about it. Sure, we change our profile picture on Facebook to show the colors of the French flag. We post about our sadness. Others vilify our foes. They want us to obsess about the Syrian passport, all those Muslim refugees, the fact that anyone of them could be a terrorist. They want us to begin to hate Muslims, and it’s easy to do so, because they look different than the rest of us.

We have a history of doing this, by the way. I could go into the lynchings of African Americans in the South or the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. More recently, hey, those illegal Hispanics. They are the source of all our problems.

The only source of our problems is our own ethnocentrisms. We love to think that we are the chosen ones, that God created the United States in His own image, a Christian image, and dammit, everyone else should just get over it and learn to be just like us. We don’t want any interlopers, and if you don’t want to change, we will spew hatred in your direction, we will spread vicious rumors about you, we will lump you in with the terrorists, and we will do our damndest to send you back from whence you came.

The simple fact is, terrorism at the levels we are seeing now is pure cowardice. Unfortunately, we aren’t considering it as an act of a coward. Instead we are caving into it more and more and polarizing as a nation. We are losing our courage, our resiliency, and worse, we are losing our acceptance off others. We no longer celebrate our differences. They become suspect instead.

That is a sad state of affairs, my friends. The terrorists don’t have to devise new ways to undermine us; they are already winning the war. They are getting under our skin. They are causing us to live in fear. They are causing us to look at others not as our fellow man, but as a potential adversary.

We are becoming our own worst enemy in the process. We are increasingly retreating into our own little worlds, believing that our smartphones and Facebook are where our real friends are. More and more, we are turning away from those around us in need, because they may be trying to sell us something, or worse, they may harm us.

And we continue to fuel the fire by giving the terrorist just what they want: A world where sides are chosen. There is no gray, only black and white. The holy war ISIS so desperately wants, one where we are against each other as much as against the real enemy: ignorance, apathy, hate and violence.

I for one, will never, ever give in. But I’m afraid many of us are more than willing to surrender to the evil in this world, because it’s far easier to close your eyes and hate, than to open your heart and love.

In the Emerald City, trying to increase my understanding of others, not fear them,

– Robb