When I realized that I was responsible for writing the Cheat Sheet this week, I was dead set on writing about the whole Neil Gorsuch debacle. It’s actually a pretty good thing that I procrastinated on doing the Cheat Sheet, because if I had written it by the deadline I’m supposed to follow, it would have been a waste of time.

Is it sad that when I saw the news of what happened in Syria, my immediate thought was “ho-hum?” Is it really news when it happens so consistently? I had already written about Syria, ISIS, the Middle East and Iraq so many times that I considered sticking to writing the Gorsuch piece.

I had to slap the humanity back into my brain.

As much as the terrible news of what’s happening in the Middle East can be exhausting, events such as the one that occurred cannot be ignored.

Upon further research, the death toll is staggering. Innocent people who have nothing to do with the Syrian Civil War—55,000 children, according to iamsyria.org—have perished in this conflict that has gone on too long.

But people can’t forget. People can’t become jaded or immune to the news that comes from Syria or the rest of the Middle East.

I know that the atrocities of chemical warfare were noted in the Cheat Sheet, but it cannot be overemphasized how horrendous this news is.

However, it also made me think, as I am deeply annoyed with everything that has occurring in American politics at this moment, how comparatively simple our lives are. I really don’t want Gorsuch to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, but on the grand scale of things, how important is that compared the chaos occurring in Syria.

I love using the phrase “first world problems” when people complain about seemingly trivial things that don’t seem trivial until you step back and see things through a different perspective. Usually, it’s simply to be annoying and demean another person’s complaint, but in this case, it is so true.

For the most part, we don’t have to wake up every morning wondering if that day will be our last, which is a very real fear for some parts of the globe. This is something that most us will never have the ability, thankfully, to completely comprehend.

I read an amazing quote several weeks ago, and I’m sorry that I won’t be able to attribute it to the owner because I honestly forgot where I saw it. It read something to this effect: “Be thankful for dirty dishes because it means there was something in there to make them dirty.”

While this saying does have a literal connection to people starving all over the world, I tend to look at it more in the broad sense of its meaning. There are so many things that we don’t even realize we should be thankful for. Think about that for a second.

Think about it when you have a leaky faucet. Think about it when you have a squeaky chair. Think about it when you have a professor you don’t like. Think about it when you argue with your roommates about whose turn it is to do the dishes.

Half a million people have been killed way before their time due to this Syrian conflict. This is not something that we should say “ho-hum” about.

Don’t revert to the old saying that if one person dies it’s a tragedy, but if 1,000 people die it’s a statistic. These are real human lives that are being lost every day, and although there are problems in the United States such as poverty and murder, we cannot possibly understand the devastation that is occurring in other parts of the globe.