A Bit of Explanation

The summer of 2004, I worked in a video game and software distribution warehouse. I spent the first half of the summer at "The Tables," the very name of which is indicative of a torture device. For eight hours a day, five days a week, I would remove stickers from video games, apply stickers to video games, count video games, and repackage video games. Quality control consisted of a girl/woman who clearly had not graduated high school, was missing several teeth, wore a ponytail on the side of her head, had glasses circa 1980, wore mismatched clothing, and had multiple earrings running through single holes. This woman was supposed to double check my ability to put stickers on video games.

That summer was definitely a low point in my life. I realize that my current job is bad in a similar manner: I pull a file one day and refile it the next, only to be told to put something in the same file later that day. Regarding school, I read; I go to class; I read some more; I do an assignment; then I go to class again. Everything repeats. There is no finality. This state of treading water is just one big exercise in futility--an exercise that suffocates you until you wonder whether you'll ever achieve anything; whether one day all the video games will have stickers, all the files will be in their permanent resting places, or all the assignments will have been done. And the conclusion is always no.

So today when I read in the New York Times that Turkish psychiatric hospitals are administering electroshock therapy without anesthesia or muscle relaxants as punishment for children as young as nine years old, that children frequently die of starvation and neglect in the same facility, and that there is no legal protection whatsoever for the people doomed to exist there, I had to wonder: will I ever be able to change anything? Will I ever have the tools, skills, and resources necessary to battle human cruelty?

We'll see.