How Does It Feel?...

How Does it Feel....

To Know that you are responsible for your own feeling of loneliness...

To realize after so long that someone had always meant a lot more to you than you had meant for that person...

To have to accept that a person will never trust you no matter how much you show that you care...

To be humbled by the knowledge that so few of us will ever make a worthwhile difference to the world...and the rest of us are just living to survive...

To realize when you look at the big picture or from another person's point of view that you were never as important as people told you you were...

When you find out someone lied to you to protect you from getting hurt...

When you watch your dream go further and further away from the chances of becoming reality until you are forced to compromise your dream for one where your goal is just to exist in this world...

To have to lie to an innocent and trusting person, who has never done you any wrong, on the face...

When you give everything you have to save a person but he/she still goes out of reach...

When your best friends achieve what you had always wanted to, without a fraction of the efforts you had put into it...

When a casual friend knows better than your best friends what qualities in yourself you are proud of the most...

To watch a person pass away in front of your eyes and not be able to do anything about it...

When a child's legs are amputated and he will never have the chance for a normal life, because you did not have the discipline to keep away from alcohol before driving...

Empathy

To patrol during those long night-shift hours and miss out on the chance to have a normal life with others, because a random thief is not interested in finding an honest job...

To have to kill the pleading, defenseless enemy-soldier because your country told you to...

To have to work in a sewage dump to save the city from clogging (whose people do not ever give a thought about your nauseating job), while you yourself live in a slum miles away...

To have to accept a bribe to save your family, causing a million poor people to lose all the money they were entitled to...

To have to walk to your own death, to save a billion people who will never know about your sacrifice and continue to waste their lives...

The Illusion of Control

Whenever we watch big organisations or groups work, or we employ their services, they give us a feeling that everything is under control, everyone in the world has a purpose and we are all heading towards it in an orderly and businesslike-fashion. They make us feel everything is ORGANISED and taken care of, by people or machines or computers, that have planned out everything well ahead and looked out for all possible glitches and hiccups.

For example, we go to a hospital and register ourselves and get accounts in their records...We tell them what tests we want done, and they give directions to go up the stairs, take a right, past the cafe blah blah blah.... When you arrive at the next counter, the receptionist already knows your name and is waiting for you. Apparently your name was passed on through the mainframe computer that runs this place. Oooh you're impressed by the organisation inspite of how busy the place looks. Another example is how your VISA or master card is recognized anywhere in the world. In college a common timetable is devised for 100s of students but each batch derive their own schedules from it according to their course.

But does it really exist? Complete, non-compromising control that is.... HELL NO!! And it can be pissing off to watch their attempts to give us this illusion.

Whatever maybe said about the impressive qualities about a mainframe computer that runs the entire hospital, there's no denying that it can and will breakdown sometime, and confuse your name for your mom's or "John Pantstill" instead of "John Painsil". However fast and quiet the new electric bullet train maybe, we know someday its going to break down and maybe strand passengers over a bridge for several hours. And how many times have you seen aircrashes on BBC and CNN?.... You get stopped by the security every-single-effing time you cross the border cause your name sounds similar to some terrorist (true story-saw it in a reader's digest issue).

Then there's the frailty of rules. And the blatant -aw what the hell- the bloody hypocrisy shown by the people who enforce them. They make themselves look so important when announcing the rules, chest out, eyes cold and pretending they can't hear your protests or explanations. And just watch how they skim past the situation when they are caught breaking the rules themselves. A professor might tell you to hand in your homework specifically on monday even though your class is on tuesday. But when monday arrives, he's like 'eh? what homework?' Your boss might tell you to cancel all your plans, no matter how important they are and attend the meeting. Then he says the meeting has been cancelled cause of an 'emergency at home' and tries to act magnanimous by saying '"I've decided to give you a holiday afterall, consider yourselves lucky".

Politicians always give us the promise, the illusion that order is coming, a better world, where everything and everyone will benefit. And that keeps us hoping and expectant, for something that we have never experienced before and so have no real idea whether we are already experiencing it or not.

Control has never existed in the past and it doesn't exist now. In the past it could take a week to tell the entire village that a meeting is going to take place in the barn or whatever, and now its all about red-tapism. What could take a year in a democracy could be done in a month in China....