The world is a complicated place, and we’re a complicated race. There are almost always more than two sides to a story. Open mindedness is a virtue, and we should be suspicious of anything held up as an eternal truth or an eternal value. These principles should be applied evenly, to democracy just as to autocracy, to equality just as to discrimination.

I don’t know if it’s my age (all of 32 years of it) or watching too much Aaron Sorkin, but I’m starting to turn from the sentiments in that first paragraph. And the world around me is not doing much to set me back on the straight and narrow.

Earlier this week, seven guys walked into a school (honest to goodness, a goddamn school) in northern Pakistan, and let loose with machine guns. Classroom to classroom, they looked into the eyes of scores of children, and ended their whole worlds. And they didn’t stop, these men, who were once human. They went and they went until they could go no more.

The day before, a guy walked into a café in Sydney and he took the freedom of everyone inside, waving a gun around like it excused him of morals or judgment. It ended tragically. More deaths. More people choosing terror over all else.

In recent months, a spotlight has been shone on the underbelly of the self-proclaimed most tolerant society on earth. Michael Brown was utterly failed by the principles of equality and democracy that the US shouts so proudly about. And his death has acted to expose a deep rooted racism in a nation that has no excuses left.

I could go on. These things that flash up on the news, that we shake our heads at sorrowfully before taking up the reins of our everyday. These things are happening to real people in the real world, and I’m getting less and less able to let them wash over my head.

I’m painfully aware how it sounds, this wailing. I’m painfully aware all I’m doing about it is sitting on my privileged backside, banging keys on a keyboard about all of this. I’m not dropping my life to go help. I’m not screaming into the shadows where these evil deeds live. I’m doing nothing but feeling bad. The guilt of the comfortable.

These people and these acts are wrong. I’m done with the grey middle ground when it comes to stuff like this. I’m done with being sensitive to beliefs and cultures that beget such terror. I don’t give a damn for the defence of the rights of the evil, or arguments more rooted in word play than enlightenment.

Those games of thought and debate, those theories of society and man, they are trodden into inconsequence when you point a gun at a child and you pull a trigger. The boundaries of tolerance are drawn when bullet rips flesh. To hell with trying to understand the exponent of terror. There is no excuse, no reason I care to recognize. I'm done with trying to see both sides of things like this.

It’s unequivocal now. They’ve made it that way. Those that choose extremism. Those that choose terror. Those that pervert otherwise peaceful beliefs. They’ve turned me away from being prepared to accept oppression as just another way to live, one that should be respected along with all the others. They did that when they mowed down children in a Pakistan classroom.

These are just words. They don’t make me feel better. I’ll wake up with my alarm tomorrow, put on my suit, go to my office, and nothing will have changed.

I don’t know what to do about all of this. Tell me? Please?