Death
I happened to be driving around late last night, and listening to the CD I made when Christopher Reeve died. That got me to thinking about all the stuff we take for granted, know that we take for granted, yet still we do nothing to rectify the situation. Why is this? We all have lives, yet anyone who's ever been a teenager (and that is practically everyone reading this) knows that at some points you don't respect the fact that you have a life that can be taken from you in the blink of an eye. As a teenager you think yourself invisible, and that nothing bad can happen to you, but it can.
You sit in your home, at your desk drinking your Cherry Coke, and playing a computer game in between surfing the net. Yet you fail to realize that this is a luxury that 99% of the population doesn't have. There are small children in Ethiopia dying of AIDS, along with their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and neighbors. Some of you think that while it is very sad and you would like to do something, you don't. I know I don't have the money to help the little Ethiopian children, but I could try. I could stop going to Taco Bell when I get hungry and instead I could grow a garden and eat my own vegetables. I could sell my computer, and get rid of my cell phone. I could even stop going to the movies all the time. Doing all this is fine and well and that would give me the extra $16 dollars a year to send one of those kids to school, so that they can fullfill their dreams of becoming doctors and scientists, teachers and diplomats. These children understand the uses for a good education and they want to go to school, and they want to learn, yet they are left to die of diseases that infect everyone they know. While we sit around and complain about having to wake up in the morning so we can take a long hot shower, grab our backpacks full of immense knowledge (if we bothered to crack the spins half the time), jump in our fancy cars, and drive to school. When we get there we'll just goof off, and count the minutes and seconds until lunch were we can jump back in our cars and drive to Taco Bell or McDonald's or Burger King, and open our overflowing wallets and shell out $10 bucks to eat something that has the nutritianal value of eating a can of lard, and then drive back to school, but first you must stop at the gas station and fill up your 40 gallon tank with $70 worth of gas just so you can fill it up in another hundred miles. Then wwe go back and fall asleep from the excess of fat in our systems, and only wake up to switch classes and at 2:10 the bell rings and we race to our cars, cut everyone off as we zip out of the parking lot to go home and have sex with our boy/girlfriends, do some mind altering substances, watch reruns of MASH and I Dream Of Jeannie, have more sex, do more mind altering substances, drive all around town in second gear trying to avoid cops while looking for the cat you lost that's not actually your cat, and then go back home to eat dinner watch some unrealistic "reality" TV show, and go to bed, just to start it all again the next day.
Now while I am not one to watch MASH or drive around looking for a cat (maybe a duck, but definitely not a cat), I must admit to being a part of this group of people. It sickens me and makes me think that I will never amount to anything. That is of course when I calm down and focus my energy on more important things, like how to loud uyp my bong and who the killer is on Law & Order.