I've been called a nihilist before...

Never gave it much thought before. Truth be known, I probably didn't really know what it meant. All I knew was that some guy with a lot more knowledge than I labeled me as one, and I liked it.

Now that I have understanding of stuff, I can safely say that I AM a nihilist - and it suits me fine.

But that wasn't the point... this is:

Not through my eyes... not through a lot of people's eyes...

A phone call last night set this all off. I'm not going into details... I don't know if it would be appropriate. But it was... unsettling, to say the least.

Anyways, I'm gonna rant and rave for a while here... just giving fair warning...

I don't live in a big place... i think my town's population is somewhere around 24,000. But in the space of a couple years, we've had such headlines that would make someone think this were New York City. Like the guy who was pimping out his 12 year old step-daughter for crack. Or the prostitute found sliced up in an alley. Or the old lady found gunned down in her home. It just goes on and on... I don't even bother watching the news anymore.

Of course, I'm taking a pretty centralistic view of things... it gets worse as I look farther and farther out. If anything made me want to hide under my bed...

And those are just the things I've read and seen... I haven't even touched base on the things I've experienced...

Like trying to sleep while listening to the screams of people getting thrown in straightjackets and having thorozine pumped into their asses. Or the look on a 12 year old girl's face when she hears that her mommy doesn't want her anymore. Or hearing over the phone how my friends are carving themselves up with knives while my best friends standing next to me about to chug Clorox.

I don't know... maybe I've turned a bit cynical in my 'old age', but none of this sounds fucking right to me...

I think it started when people stoped looking at people as people, but as things.

Throughout history, those in power have opperssed the weak and powerless. Eventually, the weak become strong, but turn out to be just like their opperssors - it's a viscious cycle.

And with that, the oppressed become more and more angry... frustrated... and they want to strike back. At anything that stands in front of them. It doesn't matter who they are, what they've done - it's realease and vindication at work. No one stops to think who they hurt and no one cares.

But what does that do to the rest of us?

It makes us apathetic. We stop caring about what's happening around us... and start accepting things we never should. It gets to the point that no one wants to hear about it - it's all old news - 'Another murder? And to think this used to be suce a NICE neighborhood...'. We turn ourselves off and try not to think that any of that could happen to us or anyone we know...

And then it does... and it's someone elses turn to ignore us...

Maybe I've blown all of this out of proportion.

But I don't think so.

The world's not right, and it hasn't been for a long long time. We let ignorance and fear rule our lives, and let them run rampant into the primitive urges that we all thought we left behind a long time ago.

But I can't help but think that none of it really matters. So what? I'm just another disillusioned person in the world... one of billions.

Do I care?

I do... but probably not enough.

At heart, I'm still a nihilist - throwing out societies morals and living by my own (which, by the way, seem to be much kinder than anything I see on the evening news...). I'm also the misanthrope, the cynic, the pallid jaundiced face in the crowd wishing it would all just end - innwardly screaming 'WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ALL OF YOU!?'.

Nothing... nothing at all...