What can be done?
***I’m amending this because the original link is broken, it was originally in reference to children being killed in the war in Sri Lanka. There was an image of a man cradling his dead three year old 
***
News stories about bad things happening to people, especially children, makes me cry. I sit there and I cry and I feel so helpless and angry that these things can happen. I cry until my throat gets sore and I can’t see. That people do horrific things to other people. I’m not a nurse, I’m not a Doctor, I’m not a politician. I work from home in the gaps when my baby sleeps. I earn a little money. I try to buy eco cleaning products and green clothes for my baby. I worry about toxins in her toys. I worry about other babies too. I worry about the lady in the local cafe who has to work six days a week even though her baby is only three months old.
I think of all the clever and brilliant people I know and think about how many of them are in jobs that frustrate them, that bore them. Jobs where you have to compromise your every creative thought to fit in with company guidelines. Jeez, lets include me here too.
We do our work and hate it, we sell our ideas for other people to get rich off. We work to fill other peoples bank accounts and what do they do with that money? Does the company that you work for do a single fucking thing for any charity that you know of, unless it is as a PR move? Or does it hoard it’s money to itself, clutching your time and your brainpower, hooks under your skin for 25, 45, 65, 165 what-ever-it-is-we-think-we-are-worth grand a year? That you spend on a holiday and a house and resteraunt food and some stupid clothes that don’t fit well and then feel too tired to do anything else.
And in the World that is what we do and that is all we do and I do it too and I hate it, and I hate myself for being part of the package of uselessness. In London I worked a bit copywriting and doing PR and I often tried to spin it round to get some charity involvement going because I really didn’t give a flying, fisting fuck about selling holidays or selling personal finance or the rest of that shit. I was a bad copywriter and PR person really. I was good at telling people to believe in themselves though. I care about people, I think that people can do anything that they allow themselves to imagine they can do. And specifically, I care about children. There are people who do bad things to children, from narcissists who emotionally hold them down to Alcoholics who make their children watch them cry. There are those sexually abuse kids while wearing the mantle of the trusted One. There are those who kill them. It’s takes a long time to come out from under that darkness for the ones who survive those kinds of childhoods. What kind of people are we that we accept the killing of our own potential?
I feel like in my head there is a war of superficial worries trying to stop me from thinking about what matters. Does it matter if I am not thin? Does it matter if I have a big crooked nose? It’s slowly shape shifting to something else once I stop obsessing about my physical appearance or my need for acquisition to something else. Can I get an agent to be interested in my work? What is it that I am really supposed to do? Shifting the shit out of the way and allowing myself to actually think … what if?
Wouldn’t it be nice to do the thing you were really good at, get paid really well for it and then be in a position to actually do something useful. Did you know that the sales of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages by JK Rowling have raised over $50 million for Comic Relief alone?