Today's Society: Comfortably Numb

"Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the last part." - William Somerset

It's safe to say we live a sheltered life. But it is not that we are hidden from the abject reality in which we live, but instead, we are over exposed to it. Any kind of overexposure will certainly build up a tolerance to whatever excess we are experiencing. The world is not a fine place, and it never has been-at least since we started keeping record of our history here. Maybe, before language and other direct forms of communication, there existed a world that was as utopian as the common person's vision of heaven. But in a world that is well aware of how miserable things are, people have-for the most part-come to accept and live with such a horrid truism.

"The world is rotten, evil people control everything, and depression is commonplace. Then again we all live in our own world, and it is our duty to make sure that it is an enjoyable place to live." An elderly man once said that to me. I never got his name, but I met him in a park. At the time I was on my way back home, after escaping an odious after school program called Day+. It was run by rotten hags; I hated them and they despised me. On my way home, during my fifth or so successful escape, I stopped at Modick Park, which was right down the street from house. There sat a scrawny man, wrinkled and seemingly disintegrating at an hourly pace. Surely he is dead now, but something compelled me to sit down on the bench he was resting on, staring out across the basketball courts onto the street.