my adulthood seems to be unfurling into an outraged mess, i am stumbling around for answers where they do not exist.
you cannot ask people why they judge you, you cannot ask adult-sized children why they think age makes them adults, you cannot ask strangers why they look at you so, you cannot ask answers of folk who do not know why they do what they do.
i don’t know if i’m speaking in specifics or generalities.
Specifically speaking I’d be referring to a close friend from high school who has resurfaced as a stinging infected thorn in my side. Once cherished closer to my heart than any other friend i’d had up to that point, now a judgmental mess of confusion and selfishness. but I digress.
Generally speaking I’d be referring to racism, sexism, loveism, warism, life-isms. I know answers aren’t easily found for our bigger issues as a country or as a planet, I know that. I know I’m asking too much, but that doesn’t keep me from asking, where is the humanity? where is the humbling truth in your footnotes on how to run the world, that we are one and the same and the love should reflect that? I know it’s asking too much to expect people to treat each other as people, I know its asking too much to wish that people didn’t rely on semantics and playing dumb to wiggle their way out of obligations and fair trades and just, trustworthy human behavior.
Again, I know I’m speaking in generalities but how do i get more specific, more clear, when these questions can be openly applied to almost any situation? Treat others as you want to be treated goes so much further than playing nice. It is the inherent truth and secret to peace, it is the foresight to reign in tongue and pen, watch your words and never hurt. It is the basic law of humanity to respect humanity.
So where has the respect gone?
I don’t know. I’m in a flurry of frustrating thoughts that circle around how helpless I feel, standing and watching the world unravel as it tends to do. What irks me more is that I keep thinking the answer is that simple, treat others as you want to be treated. but do not forget that every human is entitled to the same rights to pursue happiness, and so it is inevitable that these interests will conflict with each other. This also explains my tendency to become very quickly overwhelmed with how much there is to change and fix about the world. Billions of people existing, mostly unaware of each other, all of their interests and actions and hopes and pursuits overlapping and conflicting.
All I wanted was an answer on where to start; hey world! help me help YOU. It just feels like every time you start peeling away at an issue, be it political or social or economic, you start discovering everything that brought that issue to what it is today, and it’s usually 83569457 other social or human-related problems that catalyzed this specific dilemma. So where do you begin? Where do you push the button that finds the beginning of the sequence that will eventually unravel this tightly woven tapestry of people-troubles?
Where do you begin?
Garbanzo Bae 