My Father Always Told Me

My father always told me that life isn't fair.

The older I get, the more I see he was right. I worked as a teacher, and I saw some of the smartest, most talented kids you could ever hope to meet, who will leave school with no qualifications because they were born in the wrong area to parents who didn't have money. I've seen people who it surprises me that they have the brains to remember to breathe walk out of university with degrees.

And those degrees. If you believe the hype, those oh-so-precious qualifications are some kind of divine path to happiness and fulfilment. But then I've seen people with good degrees end up working crappy retail jobs or, worse yet, on the dole.

The crap people. The ones that treat those around them like shit, they always seem to end up with the boy/girl of their dreams, yet I know so many wonderful people who are painfully alone.

And these are just the little things, in the end. Just the minor unfairnesses of life. Because then there's war and famine and diseases more horrible than you can imagine. There's rape and murder and torture. Terrible things that strike against people who never did a damn thing to deserve it.

Yeah, it fucking gets to me. There are some days when just those little things, the things that are just in my life get to me so bad I don't even want to get out of bed. And the really bad ones just remind me how horrible and petty and stupid humanity is. So I want to stay in bed and not have to deal with any of them. If I don't see them, maybe they'll go away.

But I don't stay in bed.

I get angry.

Damn right, I do. Just because life doesn't work the way it should doesn't mean I can't shout and scream and demand it does. You might feel like you can't change any of it, that there's nothing you can do, but apathy's just an easy answer for the lazy and weak. Don't give in. Unless you're locked up in a room on your own there's always someone around to listen to your anger.

And maybe you convince them. Maybe they see what you mean, see why the world is wrong. And maybe they tell someone else.

Or maybe not.

But you're sure as hell not going to change anything from in bed.

--Hewligan