i love december. because december means 11 months of the same boring year has already passed and a new one is on the way. in retrospect, 2008 wasn't as great as 2007; but that's like comparing babies. whether a year turns out to a good one or not we have absolutely zero control over how it's going to be, since we wouldn't know in january and by december, it's too late to realize that hey, what a shitty year it has been. on the other hand, do i detect a certain amount of defeatist thought in there? c'mon, hurl all your carpe-diem-make-lemonades slogans at me. assault me with your inextinguishable positivity, convince me that my life is what i make out of it, tell me i can control the events around me and shape circumstances to suit my intents and purposes. but at the end of the day you'll sit down and realize that all these self-actualization theories serve nothing but selfish and self-centred interests. if each individual thinks only for him/herself, where does society end up? selfselfselfselfself. how tiresome.
self-centredness, you say? what some call self-centredness, others call myopia- an unfortunate but not necessarily negative state of being, if you feel that ignorance is bliss. it's inevitable to feel the impact of events that much more if someone i can identify with has been victimised; but all these events have been a daily fixture on news channels for a long long time now. and only now, ONLY NOW you decide that oh it's so sad how unfortunate? grief felt for strangers is of course never as powerful as that you feel for someone who could have been you. someone who was there at the wrong place at the wrong time. who wrapped you up in bubblewrap and told you that you've some current affairs te*flon sprayed on? balderdash. or perhaps you did not realize it yourself? what pisses me off the most is that temporary, artificial sense of loss over something that has been happening for a long time now. go pick up an international newspaper already.
i'm not trivializing genuine grief. i'm not saying it was justified. but the sadness you might be feeling- where does it stem from? human beings need to feel a sense of relatedness; time to expand that tight little circle and include the rest of the world, maybe? how sad, i'm so cynical that i'm linking human empathy to inherent selfishness. but. perhaps, perhaps if people learned to look around them more often, instead of focussing on mememe all the time, this world will be a vastly better place.
all this, looking at december. how i digress.
