The protests against police brutality against blacks have dominated the news most recently. People have been burning and looting, tearing down statues and that sort of thing. Hopefully this will result in some positive changes in our society. During the course of the protests several more acts of police murdering citizens have occurred.
Since sometime before that people have been very focused on the Covid 19 crisis. It’s causing businesses to fail, jobs to be lost and is generally bad for the economy. The virus has also killed many, particular the elderly.
The affect the virus and the protests many of us probably haven’t thought much about is; it’s provided a huge distraction from the events prior. Remember the Mueller probe and the indictments against Trump administration officials? Remember the rocket attacks on Saudi Oil fields purportedly by the Iranian military? That was only a few months ago.
Remember the US pullback in Syria that allowed Turkey to move into a buffer zone in the northern part of the country? The positive outcome was the distancing of US troops from Russian and Syrian forces. The negative is the Turkish backed militias indiscriminately killing Kurds.
Al=Jazeera reports Turkish F-16s attacked more than 500 PKK sites in Iraq last month. The Iraq government has demanded a halt to the incursions by Turkey aimed at the Kurds, a group many Iraq veterans consider allies. The Kurds are a minority population divided between Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran.
The psychological affect of isolating our minds from world events of the pandemic and riots is powerful. We must remember not to let these events give us tunnel vision.