Why

Why?

I'm going to school and taking courses like biology and psychology. I am doing photography assignments and assignments on business writing and I am paying them to do this. Them. The University-the institution that encourages the belief that we need to be there to be someone. Is it true? Are the people who get by without it only getting by because of their pure and true talent? Do I have any of this talent-the talent that the "successful" people do?

What?

Success is big on everyone's minds. My professor said that 2007 was going to be a lucrative year and that we all wanted to make money. What is success? Why are we so focused on the pursuit of stuff? Why do I want to make money? I don't want to live in a cardboard box in the gutter.

I am not talking about leading an unproductive or counter productive life; living off of a welfare check is not my idea of how life should be- but there's something about whatever is the center of a lot of people's lives that is wrong.

Why the apathy? When you talk to people about starvation and AIDS they mostly want you to shut up. What is so wrong with wanting justice?

I'm not perfect. I am materialistic and narcissistic and antagonistic. I am pessimistic and tyrannistic and just plain annoying a lot of the time.

I'm not saying that you need to be Mother Theresa. I'm not saying that I need to be Mother Theresa.

I'm just wondering where our focus is- and if where our focus is, is where I think it is I am wondering why it is there and why it isn't somewhere else. And when I say ‘our' I don't mean you and me- you the one that's reading this and me the one that is writing this- I am talking about the collective.

Focus in, darlings.

We don't automatically focus on the right things, so switch your cameras to manual and try a little harder. See the girl who is caring for her seven younger brothers and sisters? She's only 9-but there is no other family to care for her and for the rest of them. See the homeless man on the park bench? He can't have a new start because he doesn't have the look or the proper attire.

They're falling between the cracks. They are. It's not long before we join them.

In a way we already have. We're not sleeping in boxes or digging through trash or snorting a line of cocaine in a dingy basement, but our minds have slipped through the cracks. Our sensitivity has dissolved. We're wandering around, bumping into the issues each minute and just not recognizing them in the midst of our daily protests against the things we have labeled as injustices.

No no no.

We say one person can't do anything.

We discourage each other because we think it's not worth the trouble.

Justice is worth the trouble. Where and when did we lose it-the drive to go through the trouble to get to the ‘right'?

When we were kids we made Ws with our fingers and chimed "Whatever!" as if it was the cool thing to not care. That was when we were kids.