Impaled perhaps, if not for the knives in my back

I was out early last night. Or perhaps late this morning. It's a sign that spring is coming, because as I burnt a path through frosty morning fog, the first gray rays of sunlight crept over the horizon.

And as well, here I am yet again, seeing the same sun rise this morning. Nocturnal? Perhaps. Truth is, I haven't been sleeping well. I don't know what I'm doing, and it feels like I've just left a whole bunch of really important stuff behind, but I can't remember what it was, or if it was really all that important to me in the first place.

There have been so many things lately, that I should be reacting to. If even slightly. But it just seems lately that there's so little that gets to me. Car crashes, murder, war, death, destruction on an untold scale. So what? Who cares?

You might sit back from your computer monitor, slightly aghast at such a notion. Lives, you might ponder, are valuable. And yet, for years, when I brought up such topics in robust conversation, I was told that it didn't matter, and it wasn't worth worrying over.
So what? I guess it's not. To believe there's any notion of justice in the world is a naive thought indeed, when every person who calls for justice themselves squirm when even so much as a policeman pulls them over for speeding. Justice, it can be said, is what happens when vested interests are trampled upon. It's less about righting a wrong and more about making sure everyone who lost something gets paid. If not in money than in equal pints of blood. Such is the death penalty. Such is war.

For me, my days often consist of sleeping in, reading, writing, and sometimes playing video games. I could, as I did when I was away, take up the mantle for a cause, and fight for something. Attempt to affect some change. But now, I question any such action. Who am I doing this for? Not myself. Not for you. I'm doing this for some notion of a noble human being, a dying concept that lies, pierced through the heart to rotten loam.

Every night, before sleep, I ask myself when the last time my heart ached for a stranger. A completely uncontrolled outpouring of compassion and empathy. It's been a long time indeed, because such feelings are regarded as weak.

And even as I think about it... while it was greed and self-absorption that's launched a hundred wars, it's never been self-concern that's propelled men up beach heads, or forced the stay of arms. It's never been the driving force behind acts of singular courage or outstanding efforts of undeniable good. The very thing pictured as weak - as unmanly - is nothing more than the root for all our courage. And I suppose that makes us a population of cowards, to turn such a thing away.