This I Believe

My name is Krystyna and I live in a tempestuous environment of mind-pollution and uncertainty. I find it difficult to move about through the daily smog of indifference and ignorance; it clouds my lungs and travels through my bloodstream to my mind like cigarette smoke, confusing me and driving me further away from my goals. I sometimes use music or uplifting weekly happenings as an antidote, but I know there is no cure. My world consists of hearing the struggle between peoples in the Middle East, the pains and hates of the right to have an abortion, the cruelties and inhumanity of how our meat is slaughtered. I hear of rapes and murders, large conglomerates crushing small town family-owned companies, and I wonder how people can ignore it. How can people pretend it isn’t happening, how can America’s youth cast it aside and speak of no opinion on it? I just learned this week that 5,000 people die in Africa every day of starvation, and that these disregarded tragedies are mostly children. How can this be ignored?

I can’t depend on the media because it broadcasts brain junk-food, along with most radio channels that are so packed with subliminally messaged advertising it makes my head spin. I try to read books about such atrocious happenings around the world, in our meat-packing plants, in our very homes, and every book drags me further down into a white abyss of depression. I want to put a stop to this but there is so much, too much for one person, and no one cares to listen. What type of world do I live in where beauty is a commodity that will get me further than my education? What type of world do I live in where my education is poor anyway because high grades are more important than actual learning? I am drowning in all of this and whenever I try to talk with other people about it I am ignored or misunderstood and shunned into false non-existence like Africa’s casualties of poverty. I wish for world peace and it will always be impossible; I wish even to sink into the soft ignorance that others my age enjoy, because I won’t feel anything but my own concerns. And then I think, what if I am not the only one? Do other young people feel this way? I decide I cannot be alone in all this, and I realize that to succumb to blissful ignorance is to commit a crime worse than genocide. I guess I can only try to sift through the world’s tragedies and pick a few to poke at, to denude to the public. I am beginning to learn how crushing true responsibility is, and I can only hope that I will not be flattened by it.