as the stars watch me descend

Like I said, I realize that I haven't posted anything since my first post over two years ago. A lot has changed since then. My life, for one, and most certainly my interests. I would have honestly changed my icon, but LJ's uploading system is not being kind to me, and I really can't be bothered with finals coming up and everything.

I'd like to think I've matured, given that the two years that have passed are two extremely vital years in the aging of any person, but that's something that whoever reads this will have to decide.

I wouldn't actually be back if it weren't for a car crash I witnessed yesterday. I had an epiphany and no one to share it with, so I thought I'd put it on LJ.

So. Coming home from school yesterday, I saw a car crash. The crash consisted of three cars, two of which escaped serious destruction. The third car, however, was reduced to little more than a pile of scrap metal.

No big deal, I thought. Car crashes are reported by the dozens to radio stations every hour.

Which is what struck me a while later, of course--the fact that it wasn't a big deal.

Homicides are reported in newspapers. Hit-and-runs are reported in newspapers. Car crashes--car crashes are not reported in newspapers, ever. Is it because they occur too often for us to really care, enough that we can see them first-hand on a regular basis? Have we become desensitized enough to not react to the smoldering remains of a car by the freeway?

I don't feel that this is coming out right. It's not so much that I didn't care about the crash that scares me, it's that I didn't even realize at first that someone must have died. I feel that I've been raised in so detached a society that I don't even realize that car crashes mean that someone has died. I have been raised so far from death--car crashes and war and disease and everything else--that it has become difficult for me to comprehend the actual idea of death. And society goes right along with me, taking media reports of Jon and Kate Gosselin's idiotic marriage drama over reports of the fighting in Iraq or the long-existing AIDS epidemic in Africa.

The war in Iraq--I realized just now that I don't have any idea how many people have died there, not even a ballpark figure. I'm sure I could find out if I poked around a bit online, but that's not the point. The point is that I don't immediately know. It's not a present part of my consciousness. I can list the names and racial backgrounds of every one of Angelina Jolie's ridiculous amount of children, but I can't even say if the American death toll in Iraq is in the hundreds or the thousands.

And I think that scares me a lot, honestly, that we live in a time and place where, unless we actually know someone who is enlisted in the military, we can essentially pretend that there is no war. Other people in earlier times were constantly aware of war, because if it weren't causing death and destruction all around them, it at least led to a shortage of supplies and luxuries. What are we giving up? What are we giving up while all these people, so many barely out of high school, are giving their lives for us?

But the Iraq War is hardly the point. The point is that we don't see death, not even when it's staring us in the face. We don't realize that the ham in our sandwich was once a pig, and that the clean, carefully arranged meat cuts on display at the supermarket have the same sentience as the furry-tailed canines or felines in our homes. We don't see that Wilbur the pig is being cut up and packed into our subs. We certainly don't see that Mary's little lamb is sitting roasted and seasoned on our plates of veal.

I realized that this sounded decidedly pro-vegetarian, so no, this isn't a ploy to turn you vegetarian. I'm not vegetarian, although my recent imaginations of Wilbur the pig being made into the pork ribs I just ate for dinner--not so appetizing. It's just something that occurred to me, a product of one of the rare moments in my life when I'm not also caught up in the mindless media machine that I criticize here.

Just food for thought, I suppose.

So, yay, it's my first entry. Oh joy. *dripping sarcasm*

Now, mind you, I'm not an unfriendly person, just a very tired, insomniatic girl who needs to take a break from her giant shitload of homework and instrumental studies. Uh... I mostly created my LJ so I could stalk Toki_no_ito and Cloud9_alice here, and I'll probably remember to log in every three weeks or so. x_X