Day 9: We Live In A Beautiful World

Part of my morning routine is sitting down at my computer with a cup of coffee, perusing Facebook, Twitter, and various news sites to see what's going on in the world. Only very recently have I decided that this is actually a bad idea, mostly because there is so much crap going on in the world that I usually end up depressed before breakfast.

But today was an exception.

As  I was reading through various depressing Twitter updates ranging from rich white dudes who don't think women should have rights (more on that later) to George Zimmerman's likely acquittal (more on that later too), I stumbled across something amazing. 

This remarkable story , which was originally posted on ESPN.com, probably would have completely eluded me (because out of all of the sites that I frequent, ESPN is definitely not one of them), had it not been tweeted by my favorite Tweeter. I'm incredible thankful that it was because I haven't been able to stop thinking about it (or crying) since. I can't get it out of my head.

I can't stop thinking about the circumstances that people live in in this world (and this country, for that matter) and how they are nothing short of shocking. So many people's lives are filled with a hollow desperation, the likes of which most of  us will be fortunate enough to never truly know. What's worse is that people in those circumstances rarely get out of them, not just because they don't believe they can, but because other people don't believe they can either. But this story was an exception on both fronts.

I'm rarely moved to actually contact someone after reading their piece, but I found myself emailing Lisa Fenn, almost feeling like my hands racing across the keyboard were a separate entity from the rest of my body. I had an overwhelming urge to thank her for something that I couldn't quite pinpoint at first. I think that her involvement in the lives of Leroy Sutton and Dartanyon Crockett shows selflessness and humanity at its finest, and is a great example of loving people for who they are, not the circumstances they live in. But it was more than that. She was just a reporter doing her job, who could have simply walked away after meeting these two men shaking her head sadly and thinking that we live in an awful world. She could have left it at that and no one would have thought twice about them. But she didn't.

So many of us think but so few of us do. We say we want the world to be a better, kinder place but you wouldn't know it from how most of us act. Maybe someday we'll all be as outraged by the injustice in the world as we are by Twinkies being taken off  the shelves. We have the power to make the world a better place, if only we could figure out how to harness it. If we took the time to genuinely care about the lives of the people around us, as Lisa Fenn did, I truly believe that the world we live in would improve dramatically.