Victor wants to know why I think the world is such a bad place.  I tell him about war, disease, poverty.  He smiles condescendingly and points out how the lifespan has increases, how we live with higher quality of lives, how we're not at war here, now.  I tell him about starving children, the Middle East.  He nods and says "but you can't change that can you?"  As if that is supposed to make me understand that I shouldn't feel the way I do.

That's when I realize, its not me, its him.  He's the problem.  Its all him.  He's the one not sensitive enough.  He's the one who can't feel the pain of the earth as it cries out. He's the one who can turn a blind eye to the kid who asks him for change on the street down town.

But I can't.

I can feel the pain around me.  I can't walk down the street without feeling a keen despair at my world.  We don't see it, I can't change it. We clothe the world in concrete, bathe it in acid, ventilate it with smoke, and remain faithful that it will keep on going, doing what it's been doing for millions of years.  It hurts me.

When I see a child on the news, ribs showing, eyes large and full of empty hope that someone will take pity on her and pay the eighty cents per day to keep her alive, I feel pain.  When I see the angry mob throwing stones at riot police in the Middle East, I feel like I'm being struck in the chest.  When something happens on the other side of the world, it hurts me.

The thing is, it hurts others too, they just don't know it.

I don't want to be here.  I don't want to be part of the seething mass of humanity which runs about on this planet like maggots on a dead carcass. I don't want to face the hypocritical  cheer and charity which the season brings out, masking the pain of the world in green and red ribbons.  I don't want to feel the pain of the earth anymore as we tear it up and bury our own dead in its bowels.

Victor can't understand. He's deaf and blind. But he's blessed.  I will hold on to the few joys I can find.  But it becomes hard to block out the screaming of the world to hear the whispers of love which seem so insignificant.  But I eventually hear them, I have to.

But the pain is still there.  It will always be there.

And so will I