Ramblings of a Disordered Mind

I think I have to stop reading the news. So much pain. So much hurt. So many innocent lives trashed and damaged and cut open and destroyed--animal, vegetable, and mineral. I can't take it. I begin to think the world is getting worse, but it isn't getting worse. It's always been this bad. I can find ancient Biblical accounts of newborn baby boys being slaughtered by jealous kings, or of contemporary Chinese women aborting female fetuses simply because they are female. Or of girl children in India being set on fire, simply for being girls. Of boys in the Middle East and Africa forced into becoming soldiers, killing and raping machines, before they have barely reached puberty. I can find current day stories of women cutting open other women and stealing their unborn babies, or of fathers throwing their screaming children off bridges--not to mention the countless puppies and kittens that are thrown off the bridge right here in this village every month of the year. I can read historical accounts of white conquerors committing genocide on magnificent civilizations in the Americas, I can find rivers gorged with blood and brains dashed open on walls anyplace I care to look. There is cruelty and inhumanity everywhere. Women killed by their lovers, children killed by their parents, animals treated as if they were an old rug to be tossed out in the garbage. And the lies! The unaccountability of all the liars, denying the evidence of their own actions. I always used to wonder why Virginia Woolf committed suicide at an older age, as she did. I used to think that if you could make it that far, to age 59, that you had made it somehow, that you had passed the worst, and so you would live on (someone told me she despaired of Nazism and the imminence of another world war). But as I approach my own half century, I see plainly that I despair even more of the world, even more than I ever did. It looks worse and it looks like it will not get better. That no one will fix it, that the greed will not end, that people will not stop putting their own self-interested selfishness first. I start to feel crazier as I try to save what there is to be saved, what there is within my reach to be saved. I do without so that others might have more. I am very alone. I look more and more like the village crazy woman, and I feel like it too. And people continue to drive overly large gas guzzling vehicles everywhere, even onto places where once there was the respectful knowledge that cars are not driven here, that here is a place where we walk. No, now it is as if people think they have the right to drive wherever they want to. And they keep shopping, buying more crap, and eating more lousy fast food. They go on as if it will always be this way and that there will be no consequences to pay. While I despair and put out seed for birds, hoping that will soften the effects of climate change and global degradation. The Brazilian rain forest is razed so that more cattle can graze to be slaughtered and sold so McDonald's can sell more fatty burgers to fat people who have to go on disability because their health is so bad because they are clueless about how to take care of themselves. Perhaps it is me who is the idiot: I do not get rich from owning stock in companies that do unethical things to peoples and the planet. I do not get rich. I can barely save, and I never get ahead. And yes, I do give money away so that others may have something. I do. I know the world is manipulated by powers far wilier and craftier and more rapacious than me. Perhaps I am a fool. Perhaps I am insane. Perhaps I should simply stop reading the news and listen more to the stars, to the beating of hearts, to the song of the wind, to the whisper of God inside me. Perhaps I should simply rest in the knowledge that yes, I am a fool, rest content in that, and keep on trying to save what I can. Perhaps I should embrace my inner idiot and find shelter in the disordered spaces where all the misfits gather, stubbornly singing songs of love. All you children, all you half-wits, dreamers, poets, broken winged angels, solitary singers, crazed saints, let us huddle round this fire and share this day old bread.