Casual Casualties

A look back through my 15 years of life and what I see is a changed world. A world full of possibilities and full of demise. The full scale of things, if you really look, is overwhelming. And I realize, then, that we are nothing compared to the world. And that realization comes with the subsequent and ironic realization that we, as humans, think that we are bigger than life. Yet, this way of thinking, I think, is illusory. It distorts the truth of death and forms a picture of happiness.

I first learned about this not through the news, or by my parents mentioning anything, but through the sound of the police siren going off.

It was gradual. In the beginning, once every month. Then, once every week, and then daily. Keep in mind I lived on the intersection of a highway and a main road, but somehow it still bothers me to this day. I live in a generally affluent part of the country, but it was so weird. Back then, I probably thought something or the other was going on, but now, it becomes a reminder of increasing pain and suffering around the world.

And it gets worse. Programs like Good Morning America are daily reminders that death is apparent everywhere we go, but somehow the general public chooses to ignore it. Maybe its just our natural bigger-than-life attitude, but there’s something about it that is wrong. Let me describe an example of a GMA show.

“Good Morning America! I’m your host blahblahblah, and today there are a bunch of deaths. A serial killer has got his hands on a gun and killed some children. A black guy died because police shot him. Apparently they thought he was part of ISIS, but this footage shows that he was simply walking along the sidewalk. Its so sad. Now [to cheer you up], here’s a video of an adorable dog. Awww. I love it. Don’t you love that? Look at how cute he is. Now let’s go to the weather. It’s beautiful in sunny California.”

See what I mean? Need I say more? Please, alert me to any instance where this show doesn’t have some relation to the aforementioned paraphrased. And its not just that. Its a deeply embedded attitude toward suffering. In that case, what I’ve said about the world which ignores the structural violence seeping from the ground is true. If we learn more from sadness than from happiness, then we are truly a stupid people, because we constantly choose to revert to happiness, even in the darkest of times. There is never a societal urge to embrace our tears, to embrace the things that make us hurt the most. I guess in that way, we’ve masked ourselves. And these masks become the death of our truth, a gradual, but unfaltering diminishing of who we are. But in the end its just casual. A casual casualty.