Regardless of one's political viewpoint, we can agree that armed conflicts lead to loss of innocent lives. That person may be a concert goer in the desert, a worker at an airport in a foreign land, a child buried under the rubble in an elementary school or someone whose dwelling happens to be near the border. Perhaps some may dismiss these incidents as inevitable outcomes of modern war, but that line of thinking takes away from our collective humanity. We tend to dismiss this 'collateral' loss of life because we do not think of the victims as our own. We think of these people as mere numbers or faceless statistics. But they are people with families, loved ones, aspirations, a past, present and a future. Perhaps another way to think about them is to imagine them as our relatives, friends or loved ones – because after all they are someone's relative, friend or loved one. What if that someone was us?

The impact on the innocent goes beyond the........

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