sucralose and saccharine

A man stops on the street to spit at the feet of a beggar.  Enraged by the man sitting before him, in disgusting clothes, unshaven, unclean, unworthy of the attention of one such as himself.  How dare one take advantage of HIS hard work, of the efforts he puts in every day?  These people, they’re all the same.  Too lazy and stupid to educate themselves, too busy snorting drugs to hold a job, oh, He’s seen it before.  No, he won’t give a dollar, the world would be better if you starved.

A beggar slowly raises his head as he senses someone near.  A well dressed business man, probably had a bad day, wants to take it out on him.  Who gives a fuck?  He was like him once, oh, he remembered, but fortune doesn’t care and Fate is a bitch.  College didn’t fucking work and what good’s a degree?  His never did anything for him.  Ignoring the man now, he lifts the days paper to the sports section, at least that never seems to change.

On the front page of the paper, which the homeless man didn’t bother to read, was a picture of a place thousands of miles away.  Some bombs or a volcano destroyed a village and killed a bunch of people but he doens’t have time to care.  But They do, the children left in the wake of their parent’s death, alone in a country that doesn’t care.  Maybe they’ll live to adulthood, but it doesn’t seem very likely.  Maybe a bomb will come, but more likely the slow decay of disease.    Separated by destruction from anything they might have cared about, they don’t have time to lament the separation from their material goods.  They’re too busy running to save their lives.  Yet all the time wishing that someday they could be somewhere else…

This is the world we live in. 

The moral of this story?  The world is not pretty.  It is not ordered, or perfect.  It is fucked up, and we are fucked up.  Our small troubles prevent us from stopping the bad things in the world, even the smallest and most amendable. 

So.