Ideas that hurt

September 7th

Mental exhaustion and depression easily transform into a full body ache. Into an internal hurt and physical pain that overwhelms the senses. Into a shattered consciousness of dull soreness in mind and body. And exactly that happened to me last evening. And it only took a book and about 50 pages I read to experience all that — the pain, the doom, and the migraine. I had to put down this book and lay down for a while just to regain my senses.

It is not important which book and which author (the book was never translated into English). It was the message from those pages I was able to read. The book started with simple poetic words describing the rustic pleasures of a small town in the summer of the early XX century. The same simple poetic words then turned into brutal and animalistic anger against the violence of wars, and then into a resigned (but still angry) description of the inhuman poverty of small villages and towns and working-class quarters of industrial cities of that era in central Poland.

I probably shouldn't use the word working, better would be abused and exploited and kept down. Raising in anger occasionally, only to be put down by armed forces or to dissolve in internal squabbles. And I probably shouldn't use the words inhuman poverty, better would be to just say inhumanity. The inhumanity of back-breaking labor with nothing to show for it, and no hope for any betterment for children. With only a small group on top that gets all the benefits and power of the lives of others.

And among those words were some glimmers of a solution — equality for all. The equality that is written in laws and constitutions and religious dogmas — but never enforced or even strived for. Such a simple idea — that we all are equal and deserve equal opportunities. Such a brutal and cruel idea in its elementary form — because this idea is impossible to implement. That was then, but not much is different today. That was what hurt me and caused me pain. The simplicity that is only a daydream of humanity. The simplicity of equality that will never be.

I had to stop my descent into even more pain and stopped reading. But just knowing the futility of the idea of equality is still throbbing in my mind.