Antoun,
I am an emotional lightweight.
I would not have been able to handle what you have carried. At best it would have been suicide by cop.
To some of my circles, I'm a bit of a loser, or curiosity, since I didn't use my advantages and abilities to chase the gods of Mammon and its perks and privileges.
As society seems to be all against all, my sense was to play it as close to the chest as possible. I don't do stress and it seems the more you have, the more you have to worry about. Not to mention the paperwork.
In a healthy community, human or otherwise, one's value is a function of how much one adds, but in this society, one's worth is what one takes.
A big part of it is basic evolution. For most of human evolution, we lived in fairly small societies, that existed in organic relationships with environment and interactions with other groups, tribes.
So as we have become a global species, we have had to develop more complex relationships and this current mess is part of the learning curve.
Since society is too big to know very many of the people around us, we've developed systems and organizations to make things work. Such as government as a form of communal nervous system and money and banking as a medium of circulation, like blood, heart and arteries.
Yet these are breaking down, because there is no larger sense of what is happening, so we function as single celled organisms, or at most immediate family units, rather than the small multicellular super organisms that we work best at. "It takes a village to raise a child."
Though we are, by fits and starts, working in the direction of larger communities. Private banking is the current cancerous growth.
As such, I like to think of myself as sort of a white blood cell. Going to the wounds and trying to help heal them. At least in exploring causes, not necessarily being one of those directly patching them, like Doctors without Borders.
Hang in there. Not saying it is going to get better, but it is a process.
Life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie the rest of the story together.
