For decades, the conflict in the Middle East has been festering, resulting in the recent horrific aggression, on both sides. The same is occurring in Ukraine.

It comes down to hostility, an amplification of anger and aggression.

If you’re not directly impacted by the conflicts happening around the world, it’s easy to push them aside. However, daily, micro-hostilities take place. It’s human nature.

It starts when we’re young with some kids excluded from activities because they’re different. And then progresses to name-calling and bullying. Bias, prejudices, and hostilities are reinforced in homes and communities. They’re tampered into children’s belief systems, until they go off to college, enlist or move away, exposing them to different perspectives, which may erase, modify, or reinforce their learned viewpoints.

In business, there’s hostile takeovers, when a company or business attempts to acquire or merge with another company. Famous takeovers include Kraft Foods attaining Cadbury, InBev acquiring Anheuser-Busch, Oracle snatching PeopleSoft, and News Corporation adding Dow Jones & Company to their media conglomerate.

Even if a company isn’t hostilely taken over, the purchase of a company is often driven by the need to eliminate them as competition or simply slurp out the intellectual property leaving just the exoskeleton, the original company barely discernable, exhausted by a parasitic bug.

View any advice column or forum, whether dishing out personal or professional advice, and you’ll find a plethora of posts citing hostile behaviors from toxic workplaces to passive-aggressive significant others, and malevolent friends, and family members.

If you want to make a world a better place, take a look at yourself
and make a change.” Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror

Few are blameless. Annoyance, anger, and hostility, like other human characteristics, occasionally bubble up when we’re stressed or challenged. A boss who has unreasonable expectations. An associate who won’t stop talking. A friend who’s perpetually late. A demanding child. A dismissive teen.

To remedy a world full of strife, the solution starts with one person, then another, until there’s a tsunami of change. Disputes and frustrations will always occur. The challenge is defusing these situations before they become hostile.