Lone Survivor

They say that if everyone were to put their problems on display in a pile, everyone would quickly choose their own pile over the others.  We're so quick to turn our world into the worst it could possibly be without a second thought or a moment of existentialism in the greater scheme of things.
To cut and edit one's life as they wish, to fabricate their Hollywood version of themselves on display to the rest of the world.  This is what happens on a daily basis all around me. What the fuck is real?

Well, I just watched a movie, albeit Hollywood made, that has hit me to my core and has opened my eyes above the popcorn and beyond the movie screen and has quenched my thirst to know and feel more than any overpriced soda ever would. To be honest I watched it from the comfort of my couch in my sheltered home but it being a movie I've gone with the popcorn and soda reference above.  However this was not just your average escape to another realm for 2 hours in a zombified fashion movie, it became so real and intense it has lead me to write. While I write now, this movie is happening in real life.  Over and over again.  It's so distant to South Africans that we're so focused on our own pile of problems and not reality. How ghastly it would be should our problems be switched with say that of a Navy Seal in the heart of the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan.
The gravity of actual reality.

Yes South Africans are constantly worrying about getting hijacked or robbed, but it's not real until it starts happening closer and closer to your inner circle.  Until then the majority of us worry about whether the traffic will be congested on our way to the gym or whether we'll be able to watch the rugby game on Dstv if it's raining outside, or whether we'll be able to clock off early and head to the pub to chat about gym and rugby with our friends. Circumstantial, sure. Reality, no. I'm so overwhelmed with trying to make a living while I know there are people worse off than me dying. I'm so overwhelmed with how little we all do, or more appropriately, how much we don't do on a daily basis to make this world a better place.

So sickening is conflict, that we close our eyes to it and encase it on our tv screens in the form of CNN and Sky News and then discuss it oh so liberally at drinks on a Friday evening. So sickening is the world, we choose to live in our own versions of it.  NEWSFLASH, you can turn the tv off and you can change the topic of conversation but there are both soldiers and civilians praying to their God, whomever he may be, to let them live another day. Every day. Even if that day is just as harsh as the previous one.  Why do they fight? What are they fighting for?  These are questions that can only be answered by wholly understanding and experiencing, by being fully and totally educated in an objective manner and answers utterly unattainable to the common man. How insatiably I long for these answers but barely scrape the surface of just how deep it all goes. Almost everyone is anti-war, yet it happens. And it carries on happening with war fighting war.  Feeding fuel to the fire. I can't rescue every soldier and I can't whisper words of encouragement and honour into their ear moments from death.  I can't feed all of Africa and I can't stop the robber from breaking into my house.
What can I do?...

...................... something, anything.  

Ultimately everything.