In light of the recent events, it feels like people more easily place blame than they do burden themselves with it. 50 people died in Orlando this past weekend, and the following are to blame in varying quantities:

Homophobia
Gun Laws
Islam
Immigration

Blaming people creates anger and encourages a divide when there should be solidarity. Blaming pits us against one another, and hot terms like the above separate us from the shared human experiences of love, loss, death, and tragedy. Separating us from our humanity divides us and lessens the amount of compassion that we can create. There's a funny thing we do in English, where we always have to have an actor causing the action. "You broke the vase" is very different from "The vase broke." I promise, it's true. We're more likely to remember who did something... And that's important for the wrong ways.

Our media focuses a lot on the aggressors, the perpetrators, the "bad guys." He did the action, he's the reason it happen, he committed a crime. We focus on them so much that we start to zero in on people like them, why they're the way they are, and why we're different, and why we're better.

But better is a matter of perspective, and the large majority of us are not mass murderers. There are things that we universally believe are evil, like rape, and murder. Depending on your perspective, you may think Muslims are bad because they appear to commit many mass murders. Guns are bad because they're the tools people use for harm. Homophobes are bad because they commit hate crimes.

That shouldn't be the narrative we focus on in the wake of a tragedy. We should focus on the lost loved ones, the support we can give, and the empathy that these situations call for. More importantly, we should celebrate as we mourn, and work towards increasing our own compassion in spite of our anger.

There were 50 people who loved and lived fully with discrimination and challenges. Each of them chose to live freely despite the daily and constant presence of unwarranted anger and hate. Each of them feels what we feel. Each of them, at the end of the day, is human.