Experiencing a Small About Face.

I’ve never really fully connected with the world and its ways. Some part of me has always remained apart in order to observe, and such observation has brought me to a reasonable understanding of human nature. Or so I thought.

I watched the TV news bulletin at lunchtime, in which two stories stood out.

The first was a report from Syria. I saw whole communities reduced to rubble, but that wasn’t the true horror. Horror was engendered by the image of the father screaming in anguish at the loss of his loved ones. And it got cranked up even further by images of children who weren’t dead, but had dead eyes. And all to maintain the power and personal interest of one man and his system. What price my understanding of human nature now?

And then there was the story of rescuers freeing a newborn baby from a toilet outlet pipe in China. People had heard it crying, apparently. Heard it crying… right. I can cope with this. Can I? Nope. The inescapable conclusion has to be that somebody flushed the baby down the toilet to get rid of it, probably because of the strict child quota laws in China.

The trembling stopped eventually and I got back to eating my lunch. It seems, however, that a curious reversal is taking place. It seems I do connect with something after all; I connect with the suffering of sentient beings. Stories like these tear my f****** guts out! They do. Meanwhile, my understanding of human nature is looking decidedly shaky.