headlines

I went to starbucks today intending on reading my new book by Anne Lamott and doing today's crossword puzzle. I usually peruse the paper briefly reading headlines and some of the stories that seem interesting. Today I spent all my time reading. As i get older i find that my desire to know about the world outside of my exact location becomes stronger and stronger. What i read today literally brought me to tears. It wasn't one story in particular, but all of them combined. They told of sadness and rage, suicide bombings, and the horrors that occurred at Abu Graihb prison. I felt instantly helpless and utterly chaotic because i was sitting at starbucks drinking a vanilla soy latte reading about human beings, people like me, born into lives of terror and hopelessness. One photo captured a bloodied young man, head in hands, mourning the loss of a loved one after one of the most deadly suicide bombings in months. On the next page was a short blurb from the United Nations:

REPORT: 12 MILLION PEOPLE IN BONDAGE
~At least 12.3 million people worldwide work as slaves or in other forms of forced labor, the International Labor Organization said in a report on Wednesday.
In the first estimates of overall forced labor ever made by an international organization, the report said 2.5 million people were in forced labor from crossborder trafficking, with 1.2 million of them in the sex trade.
The report, "A Global Alliance Against Forced Labor," estimated that profits from trafficked forced labor totaled $32 billion a year, or almost $13,000 per trafficked worker. Profits from sexual exploitation totaled $27.8 billion annually, or $23,000 per worker, said the labor arm of the UN.

I'm sick. In fact, we're all sick. Jerry Hobbs is sick; he killed his 8-year-old daughter over mother's day weekend. how can i help? what in the world can i do? is there a solution to so much pain that seems to eat up the world? Why am i so blessed? And why do i worry so much about me when all i have to do is buy a paper to find out that "me" doesn't really matter right now? How can there be so much beauty amidst such incredible pain and destruction? I'm full of questions.

I had an English professor in college, John Parks, who ended each semester's class with his "closing postscript," basically his advice to college students trying to come to terms with this life. I took several of his classes because i loved his wisdom, his dry humor, and his inner knowing that seemed to come out during class. A lot of people thought he was boring, but i loved him. Anyway, he always ended the semester with the same words. He said that we must not seek always to find the answers to our questions, but to find a peace in the questions themselves. I like that. On a similar note Ben Folds in his song "Bastard" writes, "You get smaller as the world gets big, the more you know you know you don't know shit." I relate to that sometimes.