a cruel world
Posted by mansoor on 31 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: heart 2 heart
I’ve been off blogging again, as some may have noticed. Not that i have nothing to blog about, oh no.. quite on the contrary, i have had too much to blog about~!
And ofcourse, procrastination does reign supreme in life afterall.
But what got me to finally open up this page and write is this….
People are scary!
You read it right. People, the normal, day-to-day, run of the mill people you meet in normal life, are scary! I’ve grown up in a very sheltered environment, my parents shielding me away from any and everything bad about this world, the kind of childhood you read about in books. I grew up believing in the inherrent good of people. That underneath it all, there lies a good and loving soul within everyone. Circumstances just make them react differently and sometimes, in bad and horrible ways.
But its just a one time thing, right? Afterall, no one can be bad all their lives….. right?
This is what i believed in. And i refused to believe in anything to the contrary. Why should i? Everyone likes to talk about the bad in people, its like saying the good would somehow ‘hurt’ them and they shy away from it. Gossip sells more than the plain ordinary truth, and the more outrageous the story becomes, the more believable it is. So i gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t believe in the rumors and the gossips and the stereotypes and believed everyone to be innocent until proven guilty.
Over the years, you amass a lot of stories of the lives of people around you. Taken one at a time, they sound like abberations, freakish phenomena in the normal routine of things and you treat them as such, filing them away in the back of your mind never to recall again.
Until you do! and one by one, they all spew forth like a burst dam and you realize… just how horribly screwed up the world really is. I’m not talking about the gossips and the tantalizing stories told by my fellow man. I’m talking of the ones which were told to me by the teary eyed victims of the horrible act. The friend who got beaten up by her fiance, the other one who had to abort her rape-child, the friend who almost got murdered in cold blood by his best friend, the wife who has to live with her gay husband and his lover while raising ‘their’ child, the girl who was abused for 6 years straight before her mother rescued her from her husband, and the girl who almost killed herself and her children twice because her husband left her.
You read about these stories in the newspaper or hear about them on TV all the time, but it doesn’t affect you. The stories listed above are from people i’ve known personally from time to time, and some told to me in the strictist confidence. I’ve many more, but they are too weird to even mention.
Its really a horribly cruel world out there… and i dont know who/what to believe anymore.
The world is a cruel, cruel place
like yourself, i too have, especially of late, come across stories of people who put up with abuse, domestic violence, mental toture at the hands of significant others and spouses. It’s horrific, because the husbands seem to get sadistic pleasure out of it
And it shocks me -because all i can think is…this isnt supposed to happen… i cant blv this is happening to someone whos; THIS close to me!!!!
We’ve all had very sheltered lives, and we should be greatful
sometimes- ive been ungrateful enough to ask - why did u protect me so much. SOmetimes I;ve been so horrified at how shallow people can be that it’s positively overwhelming, and i totally want to withdraw into myself because i wish not to risk being hurt again, or stunned into speechlessness.
But what i’ve learn is - dont expect anything from anyone- and you won’t be disappointed as much…
… It’s easier to shut out the hate in the world that way
i totally agree wid u mansoor.i do.it hurts me so much to see the horrible truth around me n i feel helpless n heartbroken but cant do anything abt it.sometimes i do feel that man is evil by nature.although our religion says the oppsite.
batool: i am grateful for it yaar, because i even though i know these things now, i am what i am for not knowing them in the past…
umarah: if not for a couple of people who still have managed to keep my trust, i would’ve been very jaded myself. the hurt kind of goes away whenever i see/meet these people and they are the ones who then become the guiding light of my life.
With every passing day confusion builds up in our minds as to what is right and what is wrong. It seems as if everyone is running about for personal gains and they’ve just forgotten what “good” is. Good is good only until one is gaining something out of it.
At times I feel I will never get what people are really like which scares me too. So I will totally second you on that. We live in a really cruel world and mostly importantly in a world which has no identity or even if it does it has a hundred million faces to it. One can never tell what people are really like or what the society is really like. Is it the one we used to read about in school in our social studies books? Or is the one where anyone will do anything to demean and destroy the happiness of the other person for no particular reason? I wish I was a small child who was unaware of life outside home and school. I so wish. All I can say that this was a really excellent post. Something all of us feel yet very few of us say.
The same world is inhabited by incredible acts of kindness and selflessness. Some are grand, but some are just people being nice despite day-to-day encounters with acts of cruelty.
“Verily We create man in the best conformation, and thereafter We reduce him to the lowest of low…” (Al-Qur’an, 95:4-5)
People aren’t bad, they do bad stuff. The one and the same has the ability to do good in them. Witness Umar bin Khattab’s life. Have faith