Thursday, March 22, 2007

We Interrupt This Blog to Get Really Pissed Off

Not about my kids getting on my nerves. Not about my husband's incapacity to put things away.

I'm pissed off about dead kids. So pissed off I want to scream and bust open this computer and the world wide narcissism it accesses.

I'm pissed off about the kids I know who know what it's like to go to their friends' funerals, and who are scared to walk home down their own streets.

I'm pissed off about kids who go off to war and come home maimed, with memories of their friends' dead bodies, or who don't come home at all.

I'm pissed off about kids in Iraq whose families, neighborhoods, and country have been destroyed.

I'm pissed off about Iraqi insurgents blowing up a car with kids in it. Dead kids.

I'm pissed off at people who abuse kids.

I'm just burning up with anger, and it seems such a pathetic response to pour it into this blog. I'm idealistic enough to feel like I need to be doing something, but cynical enough to feel like nothing I could do would make a real difference. Yes, S has a half dozen kids who are in his kitchen instead of on the street, and hopefully his support will help them escape becoming dead kids, though it might not. And my job, well, it's not exactly developing alternatives to napalm, and it makes some difference in an oblique kind of way. But there are so many kids, and they need so much, and I just can't imagine how to give it to them, to give them the world they deserve, and it just makes me crazy.

5 comments:

Jenny Davidson said...

Yep, makes me crazy too.

Phantom Scribbler said...

I keep going through days blankly, trying not to show that I am completely consumed with rage and -- let's admit it -- hopelessness.

jo(e) said...

I know the feeling.

postacademic said...

I didn't want to get pissed off about death in my own blog, because it wasn't really my story, but I'm really pissed off and sad and anxious as a consequence of the death of a friend of a friend, who died two weeks ago from a heart attack at the Fillmore from a combination of ecstacy, long-term cocaine use, and possibly police force (they handcuffed him when he started to freak out). I went to the funeral last weekend and it was really sad: he's leaving behind a girlfriend and his parents. The thing that pisses me off is that a drug-related death at the age of 40 is completely preventable, i.e. stop doing drugs like a college kid. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that male self-destructive behavior among my 40-something peers pisses me off, but that my being pissed off is the flip side of loving self-destructive people. And I'm sorry for taking up so much space on your blog, but I needed to say this somewhere.

Libby said...

I think I walk through the days in deep denial, trying to pretend I'm not angry, or that I'm actually doing something about it, or both. Mostly it works; sometimes, not so much. Postacademic, sorry for your loss--sometimes those ones at a slight remove are the hardest, since there's really no one to process them with fully.