Every few months, or even weeks, sometimes days, I get lulled into a sort of complacency and malaise with my everyday life in the upper middle class bliss that I live in. It is so easy to forget about life outside of the comfortable cushioned bubble that so many of us live in. I live in it. All of my friend live in it. Everyone I see and interact with on a daily basis all take part in this particular small corner of reality that is only a thin veil over the deeper shit going on in the world around us. At the very least I live in a city and in a neighborhood where it cannot be taken completely for granted. But it can still be forgotten. Suppressed down to a dull fear lurking in the shadows that becomes amplified in a particular twisted direction by threat level colors and constant fox news coverage.
Then to break up those months or weeks I encounter that other reality. Sometimes I can even ghost through taking statements in a Liberian Refugee camp and hear the horrific first person accounts of what happens to people and remain distant from it. Remain isolated from the raw emotion and grief contained in the horrors of what people can do to each other. This time it took watching American History X again to really remember. To really have it brought home that life is not a cake walk of wedding planning, dog raising and bar tending. Life is very very real for people outside of that bubble. To forget that, it to stop being truly amongst the living.
