Sometimes I stop everything I’m doing as a comfortable person with a job and income and food and a home and it hits me that there is a genocide happening in this moment and children being murdered with state-sponsored weapons, and it’s crippling.
I am not a young person, I have seen some shit in my decades. But it still hurts like hell every time I think about the suffering we’re still allowing as a species and that feeling and sensitivity to the knowledge has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Greater awareness leads to greater pain because you start to see the whole picture; what we are as a species, what we can and cannot do, and how much sorrow and misery we put each other through needlessly.
This is what really hit me reading Mark Twain’s autobiography when he started describing the atrocities by the US government against Native Americans.
His autobiography was dictated to a stenographer which he then edited later. This way it has the feeling of a simple discussion with Twain, and because of this the discussion of tragedy as a current event, just as you and I would chat over a coffee, really hits home how little we’ve changed.
I often come across as cold and unsympathetic, severe and uncompassionate.
That’s because I’m extremely empathetic, toward all life. I don’t even kill bugs. But I know too much. I’m aware of mass suffering around the world, needless and preventable.
I’ll give myself little spaces of time to just sit and think about everything, and it just turns into ugly weeping. You can’t function like that. The only way I can get through my day is by turning that dial waaaay down outside of my designated mourning time.
Sometimes I stop everything I’m doing as a comfortable person with a job and income and food and a home and it hits me that there is a genocide happening in this moment and children being murdered with state-sponsored weapons, and it’s crippling.
I am not a young person, I have seen some shit in my decades. But it still hurts like hell every time I think about the suffering we’re still allowing as a species and that feeling and sensitivity to the knowledge has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Greater awareness leads to greater pain because you start to see the whole picture; what we are as a species, what we can and cannot do, and how much sorrow and misery we put each other through needlessly.
This is what really hit me reading Mark Twain’s autobiography when he started describing the atrocities by the US government against Native Americans.
His autobiography was dictated to a stenographer which he then edited later. This way it has the feeling of a simple discussion with Twain, and because of this the discussion of tragedy as a current event, just as you and I would chat over a coffee, really hits home how little we’ve changed.
I often come across as cold and unsympathetic, severe and uncompassionate.
That’s because I’m extremely empathetic, toward all life. I don’t even kill bugs. But I know too much. I’m aware of mass suffering around the world, needless and preventable.
I’ll give myself little spaces of time to just sit and think about everything, and it just turns into ugly weeping. You can’t function like that. The only way I can get through my day is by turning that dial waaaay down outside of my designated mourning time.