The longer I live, the less anger I feel toward people who do bad or crazy things and the more I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for the ignorant, the angry, and the apathetic. For the violent and their victims. I feel sorry for everybody. Every copy. Every BLM activist. Every racist. Every billionaire. Every rapist. Every politician. Every priest. Every prisoner. As Kurt Vonnegut points out often in his final book, none of us asked to be here. In a scene in that book, Hitler’s final words before killing himself are, “I never asked to be born in the first place.”
We are all victims of our circumstances.
I try not to feel sorry for myself for a host of reasons. Mainly because self-pity is such an ugly trait. More so because as a white man in America I have been given every advantage a society has to give. And more even than that because I have been given the greatest advantage any person can have: I was born to two people who loved me and loved each other.
I feel sorry for Donald Trump. He is a man who appears to have led a charmed life: born to wealth in a society that worships it, he has achieved supremacy in the thing that matters most to him: fame. He obviously could not care less about being president of the United States, as least as far as doing that difficult job goes, but it keeps him in the center of the spotlight, the only place where he can find any value in himself. He has had sex with more women than he can remember, but he has never made love. He was not born to people who loved him and loved each other. He was born to raging assholes who were incapable of teaching him the first, and most important, lesson of life: how to love. What could be more pitiful than that?
Isn’t it a pity?
Isn’t it a shame?
How we break each other’s hearts
And cause each other pain
How we take each other’s love
Without thinking anymore
Forgetting to give back
Isn’t it a pity?
Somethings take so long
But how do I explain?
When not too many people
Can see we’re all the same
And because of all their tears
Their eyes can’t hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them
Isn’t it a pity?
Words & Music by Mike Power 