The Pleasure of Ignorance

The one thing I’ve learned from learning nothing at all from personal experience is to search for the knowledge given by those who suffered through the hardship.

It's amazing that I've been so lucky to have never been poor. A middle-class US citizen is what I was born as. I’ve never lived on the streets; went from home to home struggling to find something to eat. I've never had to compete for clean water.

My room is neat. I’ve never had dirt floors and the top of a tent for a ceiling.

I’m a white-privileged westerner with no experience in suffering. And while I try not to be ignorant, I will never know the pleasure that brings.

My bragging right is knowing where I’ll sleep tonight is the same as where I woke up today. I'm not sure I believe in a god, but I tend to still pray.

I pray for those that’ll never have it like I do; they’ll never worry about a phone battery. They worry about police brutality or their dictator’s morality, or over-thinking what they’ve done because their mom's still drinking.

And they’re still sinking further down into their depression. I pray for the person with their lungs compressed and chest heaving, ribs showing. Knowing they're seething but not expressing that they're having trouble breathing. They’re staying up all night reminding themselves that their mom is too busy, because their brother is dying and they hope god is forgiving. I pray for the child scared of another tribe attacking, worrying they won’t be able to put up a fight. Where the last time they ate was four or five nights ago and everything moves so slow that they’ve forgotten their age. But they don't care because the only question that looms is “when was the last time papa got paid?”

There’s sex slaves and low wages and mental disease. There’s poor recognition of those who have never and will never have peace. The heroin addict who’s still awaiting her prison release. The Muslim woman who gets stared at because of discrimination and false beliefs.

Maybe the murderer hung themselves after.

Maybe the atheist hopes God is real.

Maybe the psychopath wishes they could feel.

Maybe the comedian only laughs at their own jokes when they’re crying.

Maybe the pathological liar wishes they weren’t lying.

Maybe the anorexic teenager wishes they’d have ate.

Maybe the gay man wishes he was straight.

Maybe the bully receives the most hate.

I’ll give you my wealth if you give me materialistic objects that give me temporary happiness until I realize that the hungry are only satisfied with their meal until they need another, and the rich man wanted more money after he got a ‘small loan of a million dollars.’