Never Established

And not in the ‘awesome’ sense of the word.

Sometimes I wonder exactly how it is that people can be so malicious so much. Yes, there are little things, things that affect me personally on some level, but then there are large things that just illustrate how horrible people can be: to the things around them, to animals, to the environment, and to each other.

It starts off small; snarky and intentionally dampening comments made by friends, maybe the parents of friends, people you work with. It’s the odd ability for people to somehow believe people who are ‘different’ from them are ‘inhuman’, that they have no feelings, that they’re irrational and obviously don’t know anything. It’s ridiculous.

It’s small things, things I can shrug off without much concern, albeit a little pique;  guys I’ve never met driving past in a car, yelling out at me that I’m fat and ugly, people being so selfish that they won’t even hold a door open when you obviously have your arms full, tiny things like that.

And then there are the bigger things, the things that honestly make me wonder how I can possibly come from the same species as them, things that make me ashamed to call myself an Australian, a caucasian, a ‘western’, even a human. It’s the racism left over from the Cronulla riots, a young Aussie saying of the riots that “The wogs seems to have learnt their lesson, not to come to our beach”, it’s the obscene belief that all muslims and bad, this need for people to have an enemy. It’s so Orwellian, like we’re being directed to hate to maintain control, and it’s ridiculous. 30 years ago, no one gave a minute’s thought on the subject of Muslims. No one cared. No one associated ‘muslim’ with ‘terrorist’. 30 years ago, everyone was very concerned with the communists. And now? Does anyone really care about the communists? How regularly do we talk about them in every day conversation? From all that worry, all that paranoia, did the communists actually take over the globe, did they crush our capitalist nations? No, they didn’t. And Muslim is a religion, it is a way of life, it cannot account for the actions of a person — the people themselves must make their decisions for violence or for peace. In no way does it preach anything but tolerance.

It’s finding out about a story like this, in which a young girl with depression killed herself, due [in part, though I won't attribute it fully] to the mother of the girl’s friend. The mother, acting in with what I can only interpret as selfishness and maliciousness, joined myspace simply to find out if this girl was badmouthing her child. Frankly, can I just say that that, in and of itself, is so petty. And then she turns around and, knowing the girl’s depression and her mental state, calls the girl a slut, tells her that no one wants to be friends with her and, still pretending to be this boy a girl considered a friend, told the girl that ‘he’ never wanted to speak to again because she was a bad friend.

Now talking as someone whose brother has depression, I know firsthand the sort of reaction that can have. I have seen my brother so upset, and I can almost see him replaying lines, sentences in his head, and they basically consist of ‘no one loves me’ or ‘i’m not good enough’ and ‘I don’t have any real friends’. That sort of attack on a person from an adult just seems so senseless, so selfish, and what in gods name happened to living with the idea of ‘do as you will, as long as you don’t hurt me’.

It just seems so senseless. People are people are people. It’s that simple. I wish we could show a little more compassion. I want to embrace the idea of good karma, of doing something nice in the hope it’ll come back to you, but it being okay if it doesn’t. I want people to look at someone different and feel curious about the differences rather than fearful. And then I want them to realise that ultimately, people are really quite similar, beneath it all.

Okay. /ranting.