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You know, it's rather funny the way things work, ironic really. In my never-ending journey to be a better christian, this becomes more and more clear. And the irony is love, or rather the lack of it. C.S. Lewis pointed this out in one of his books, probably more than one, and it's absolutely true - the better one tries to become, the more one tries to do what God wants and to love others, the more one realizes just how terrible one really is inside. As he put it, if you always give in to something, you can never really know how hard it is, how difficult. It is only when you try to resist that you find just how hard something is. Only an alcoholic can know how difficult it is to not drink when he or she tries to stop.
And likewise, one can only truly realize how sinful one is when one tries not to. I mean, until I really started trying to be a better person, I thought I was a decent person. I didn't do bad things I thought. I didn't hurt people, I wasn't cruel. Irony is funny that way. It was only when I started, perhaps only as recently as in the last year or so, trying to be better, to love people as myself, that I realized just how, jsut how much of a crap bag I am inside. And I'd wager there are few people who wouldn't discover the same thing eventually.
Do you know just how hard it is not to insult someone back? To not get angry at some jerk who deserves whatever he or she is going to get? To keep your mouth shut when some jackhole won't shut theirs? To realize that there are so many things that are terribly cruel but couched in a joke? Well of course, I can hear people saying, we don't do that. We're decent. We're good. That person deserves those names. That jerkass deserves my anger. How I wish I could have that back, but that would be stupid of me.
I don't even know when it started happening. The little moment here when I thought to simply not say anything instead of a little "joke" that I thought was good fun, but was mean. The instant when I had to stop myself from getting angry at someone who cut me off at the light, the teacher who I felt was doing something unfair, or any number of a million other instances. This is not to say that I am in any way different, that I have anger problem. If you knew me in the last few years of my life, most of it really, I would come across as the shy, perhaps funny, laid-back guy. Boyscout maybe. But the thing is, all this crap. This anger at things, we all have it. And we all think it's justified. Crappy day at work or school, crazy drivers, long lights, dillholes, whatever. The irony here is that anger, hate, basically everything that's not love, it's so much more a part of us than we can ever realize. And just try and fight it. Wowwy that's hard. Try *not* getting peeved at someone who annoys you.
The rub, aside from smelling like rub, is that the more I've tried to work on myself, the more little things, even huge things, I find that I don't like. And seeing them in myself, I see them in others. And everyone has them. Bigger or smaller proportions of various things, but they're all there. The closer one gets to the subway light, the more one realizes how dirty the place is. Of course, when that happens, one can actually start to try and clean up a little. Hmm, I can't really remember the exact place I was going with this, but it was something I wanted to say I suppose. Heh, it's a good thing I find irony so funny. Otherwise, it might be rather depressing.
I got out of sociology early yesterday. It was like 10 minutes into class, and Frank had one of the students explain about how there was going to be a walk-out and a rally across campus at 1:30 in protest to some of the things the SRC and the president are doing to the college, one being the removal of the culture centers (that according to someone in the SRC, don't really do what they're supposed to anyway). Frank said we should all go and write a half page on it that would count as a written response. Of course, several of us objected, having class at two, but he said that was okay, it was only worth points toward our grade. *shakes fist* I trekked there, and got there to find they were waiting for more people. I waited for like 10 minutes, got fed up, and went to class. Along the way, there were several groups coming, and they were carrying cardboard caskets and poorly written placards and whatnot. I think the paper said they were going to hold a eulogy for diversity. Of course, my friend walking with me to class said that diversity often only becomes a problem because people make it one, and then pointed out that he doubted if hardly any of them had ever even been to the cultural centers, and he was probably right. The whole rally had the vibe of a sixties rally, and it was just one of those things that gave the idea that it was just something for people to get upset with, and they didn't really care all that much about the whole thing.
