I Don't Like To Take Up Causes

This world is not perfect.

People get shot for just walking to the corner store. Natural disasters take out entire villages. Innocent babies are thrown in the trash shortly after being born. These are a given. I hear about stuff like that and I let it roll off my back. Because I have to.

I'm not strong enough to care.

My psyche is fragile at best. If I had to sit and read the stats on how many children die of starvation or malnutrition everyday, while I overeat on a regular basis, throwing out perfectly good fruit because it has a tiny bruise, it will kill me. If I watched every documentary on the mistreatment of POWs or cattle or the earth, knowing that I don't recycle regularly and that I still eat meat on occasion, I'd hide in a corner of my closet and never come out.

I don't want to know that KFC slaughters its chickens by kicking them around and slamming them up against a wall. I just want to enjoy a 3-pc meal at the mall and be done with it.

I don't want to know that the milk I love to drink- like it's my JOB- is obtained inhumanely. I just want to down a glass with a short stack of apple-cinnamon pancakes and not know where it comes from.

I don't want to know that every time I forget to turn my lights off at night I'm contributing to the impending power shortage that this world is facing. I just want to keep the boogie-man away and watch movies all night.

And I really, really didn't want to know that Japanese fisherman hunt whales and dolphins in the most vicious and cruel manner, as seen in this video here:



This doesn't help me. This doesn't make me want to lead the charge against Japanese fisherman. All it does is make me feel powerless and depressed and selfish. I know that more than half of the horrible things happening to poorer nations and helpless animals benefit my way of life in some way. And although I know that a lot of this is wrong to the 100th power, I don't want to lose my comfort zone.

So I'll sign petitions to keep the government from drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Reserve, to save the polar bears and whales and dolphins. But I won't march, and chances are, I'll never stop drinking milk.

However, each time something like this surfaces, I lose a little more respect for the human race.

And myself.

*smooches...with a dash of shame and an ounce of apathy*
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imagine what loneliness
will drive someone to do
now multiply that times me
and multiply that times you
now imagine what it would take to make
this all happen again
and just when you think you're gonna cry
multiply that times ten