actually kind of short time away from 43T, I’ve seen & done more than I wanted to see & do. Helped out a brother with the help of another brother, mostly. But that involved involvement with an ugly part of the world I left behind. Been there, dealt with that, got the hell out.
Maybe you can go back, but if it was ugly, why would you want to go back?
Ugly as in crude, vicious, selfish, and having few ethics & nearly no conscience. My brother needs to make the break, and he finally sees that. About time. I’m getting too old for that sort of street level idiotic shit. And he’s too old to be needing his brothers to help him out of trouble he got himself into.
I was so dragged down by the whole thing, so disgusted with people, with ‘systems,’ with greed & people who want what someone else has, not because they can use it, but just because, with people who enjoy having gotten power over other people because they enjoy manipulating people on a whim, whenever, for no reason, always through threats of violence or pain. I don’t like people who train their dogs that way. It’s sick. It hurts people who don’t deserve pain.
That kind of crap happens all the time, pain being inflicted every second of every day in millions of lives, human & animal. For the pleasure – the pleasure – of inflicting pain.
This time it dragged me way down. It’s too much. Or it felt like too much.
But empathy is one thing, and letting myself get crushed when I’m not even a direct victim is just stupid. Yeah, the assholes take and grab and steal most of the power positions, both petty & significant positions, and they inflict pain. Greed rules. Greed runs the world’s ‘systems.’ Even good people get duped & dragged into it, misled, unknowingly, or out of desperation – whatever.
But the good things have to count. Relief for the current victim closest at hand can be provided, or at least contributed to. Sometimes justice can be gained, sometimes only relief. That has to be a priority for me in my life. I have to DO something to counteract the shit and the slimeballs who fling the shit. Maybe I can’t fight the assholes. They get pretty entrenched & powerful. But I can provide some RELIEF.
If I don’t do that, if I don’t HELP when and where and how I can – even if I don’t want to turn into a Mother Friggin’ Teresa – if I don’t, how human am I? Or is the human part the asshole, and how human in that way would I want to be?
A woman on a bus moaned about the cellulite on her thighs just ruining her life this summer. Catastrophe. My nephew goes into a sullen silence because his mom won’t let him get an ice cream from the over-priced, irritating mini-truck that goes by with that stupid song playing. A man breaks the window of a parked car, grabs the dog inside & hurls it into a brick wall. A 3 year old girl has less than half a head of hair because her parents yanked it out in ‘disciplinary’ actions.
Holy shit! Where are our brains? What the fuck is going on & how much can we tune out. Then again, how much can we take in without going insane.
Little things. A buck in the food bank jar at the store. A smile at a kid. An extra hand pushing the dead car out of traffic. Not honking when it’d be just venting frustration. Talking someone out of dealing with people who break bones as easily as blowing their nose. Not giving out that judgmental sneer because who the hell are you to do that, anyway?
Admitting that I do need to be around people, people who still have good hearts, even though I so often fucking hate the human fucking race so much.
