despair

A description of hell on earth:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/03/brothel_cambodia.html

What could be worse than this? And why is it that there is a vast ocean of difference between what is described here and my life, or yours?

What is more hellatious, the hell dimension in which everyone lives like this, or the hell dimension that we live in, in which most people live like this and a few live like us, and and all of us, us and them, make their lives even worse , as we are "helping them" and even "allowing them" to become like us and as they do what seems easy at the beginning to grab onto a peice of the life they see on the television?

And is it so great? The most evil characters in the peice above are the Westerners who are so sad and desperate to feel alive they have gone to Cambodia to do something incredibly depraved and incredibly harmful, just to shake off the mundanity, the mediocrity that's swollowed them.

The girls in this story... and the boys sold into labor... what is it to be like that? Maybe I've had a glimpse. To live and operate every day with that kind of pain and sense of hopelessness... you must become hard, like stone, sometimes even mean, and you have to become truly alone, disconnected from everyone else, and even yourself, like you are locked in a tiny dark room, and you can't see or hear anything at all, you can't see your hand in front of your face, so you stop being so sure that you exist. So, you don't feel it and it doesn't hurt, and it won't matter when you get strangled after you've passed your prime and the pedophiles don't want you anymore, or if you do make it past your teen years and maybe a child comes out of you, you won't need to pause and feel sympathy when it is your turn to sell her.