The State of Things

I just found out today that a coworker of mine lost 6 members of his family in the New Orleans flooding. This news left me totally speechless. My heart aches for him and his family.

Also just tonight, my neighbor called 911 and was taken to the hospital. We don't know what's going on exactly, our other neighbor called her in-laws while the paramedics were here.

There's so much going on in the world. Tragedy, pain, fear, uncertainty.

It happens all the time, every day. But usually it doesn't always affect us directly, and so it's easy to forget. Easy to overlook. Easy to ignore. We often insulate ourselves from the very idea of "bad things" ever happening to us, blithefully turning our gazes away from the very notion. We build up invisible walls in a vain attempt to shield ourselves from the harsher aspects of life, the ones that we don't want to mar our self-inflicted delusions upon which we base our perceptions of reality.

Until something happens that jars us from out little shielded santuaries, and forces us to face the ugly truth we try so hard to avoid.

There's a lot of pain in life. That's just the state of things. One of the worst things we can do to each other, as human beings, is to make things worse with pettiness, selfishness, and thoughtless cruelty.

I'm as guilty of it as anyone else.

-_-