What Are The Chances?

My weakest point, the most vulnerable part of me, is the desire to trust.

I have a deep down longing to trust people. I want to think of them as good.

I fight this, making constant attitude adjustments assuming that almost anyone I am dealing with is the enemy.

I have been doing this a lot lately and I am getting good at it.

This has been primarily necessitated by the joyous climate where I work. I won't get into details but I have taken to wearing a bullet proof vest backwards to ward off the constant thrust of knives to my back.

The problem is, my fall back position is trust.

When I let my guard down, I trust.

Another cop has killed another black man. In South Carolina. This time there is a graphic video refuting the cop's story of self defense.

The cop is being held in the Charleston County jail. He is one of 366 white men in an overall population of 1,198.

This is a beautiful situation.

Unfortunately he is under maximum protection. When he leaves his cell he is surrounded on all sides by prison guards.

The more I become aware of stories like this, as well as kids being slaughtered in schools and people being massacred in malls and terrorists beheading people in the name of God and extremists exploding bombs and killing innocents - the more I ache.

As a human being, I just ache.

It sounds naive, maybe overly sensitive but it is true.

I cannot believe or grasp the violence and acid hatred that fills this world.

It bothers me.


A lot.

What are the chances that the human race will turn itself around? That it will stop for one long moment, take an honest look at the world we live in, recoil in horror, and adjust?

Zero.

I don't think it is going to happen.

The decline of this country mirrors the decline of the world. We are starting from a higher point economically, so we have a much more precipitous fall in that arena.

Morally we are no better than anyone else.

We are all going down together.

What bothers me is that I cannot understand it.

Where does this hatred come from? Why don't we recognize it, learn from it and just fucking co-exist?

I want to trust people. I want to think there is good in the human heart.

The more I see, the more I am convinced that everybody else is the enemy.

My fallback position is becoming increasingly dangerous.