Received an email from aeryise about a posting on a mutual friend's blog that basically talked about being torn between faith in mankind and cynicalism about the depths to which humans can go. I guess in response to aeryise's question about how one can live in that state. I think you really grow to survive with that mindset.

I don't even think of it as heartbreak anymore. I used to be extremely idealistic, i think you all start that way when you are a kid. That's why in the model United Nations conferences that we used to organise for the secondary school kids, countries always reached peaceful solutions within the span of an hour. In the real world, China would never fall over apologising for aiming nuclear missiles at Taiwan. World Peace would not be proposed and reached as a treaty in the span of a day. Things just don't work that way, because we're all too old and cynical about it. Too scared that everyone is going to try and take the bigger piece in order to actually try to increase the pie.

But back to the point, I'm older and I guess wiser now, at least in the ways of the world and still trying to find the balance between faith that men do good things and the overwelming evidence that men do some pretty awful things too. The sad part is that the good things usually come as individual acts and the awful things as events on a world scale.

How do you live with heartbreak when the object of heartbreak isn't a person but an idea?
Well, maybe the answer is the same as how you live with normal heartbreak. You scream and cry about it for a while, you get mad at the world for a while.. and then you realise that u being mad at the world or the guy or the idea doesn't do anything to change it. After a while, the pain dulls, and then you learn to live with it. Every once in while, I still want to scream about the injustice of the world, or something awful that i read in the newspapers (the sad part is that that often comes in the letters or opinions pages than in the actual articles), but for the most part, it's there but i can live with it.
The way I see it, there's no point in being cynical because that just perpetuates it. If I hate mankind and I think mankind is going to do awful things to me, I'm more likely to do awful things or even just not to do nice things because i don't think they'd be appreciate it or because I'd get hurt doing it. Just because most christians (I'm sorry to say) are concerned with judging others doesn't mean that there aren't any who are truly selfless and love their neighbours.

In the end I think, it was the quote from one song that kind of caught me and held me there.

"And I hear them saying you'll never change things,
that no matter what you do it's still the same things.
But it's not the world that I'm changing.
I do this so, this world will know
that it will not change me."

Extremely idealistic perhaps, and I'd be the first to admit that I don't always live up to it.. but it would be so nice if I could.