Survival

I laugh and joke when I have a bad day and tell people "Oh, just shoot me, now!" Then I watch a movie that just sobers you up. I watched "The Way Back".  The story is questionable, but there is no denying the harsh conditions that humans bestowed upon other human beings with the Gulag prions camps.

I also happened to catch "The Help" about how black maids were treated in the South during the sixties. It just boggles my mind in an attempt to understand why some people were born in this era and in that country and others were born elsewhere. 

I've had it pretty darn good all my life. It bothers me and makes me wonder how can people treat others like that? I know it goes on today. I know I need to be so grateful that I was born in America and in this time. But why? Why is there so much suffering?

Does it sharpen our will to survive like an exercise? If we all had it easy would we (as a human race) become lazy and lose our sense of survival? With certain people suffering in this way, do their offspring inherit that will and do we (the reader or the witness to such horror) become inspired to keep that will to live alive? Is there a "reason" for all the suffering? Is it to remind us and keep us aware of the need to survive when things get tough? As life inevitably does.

Maybe there is a reason for all this pain and suffering. Like the common cold exercises our immune system so that our bodies are prepared for much bigger illnesses, the suffering of humans keep us sharp for life's unpredictability and extreme conditions.