My first memory is of my grandfather, Dandy, frying me chicken in the early hours of the morning. I am sitting on his hip watching the chicken fry in the iron skillet. I remember crawling down the back stairs backwards to get to his room. I could not go down the stairs standing yet. I opened the door to the guest bedroom, walked over to his bed and said "Make me fried chicken." He tried to pull me into bed to go back to sleep, but I was having none of it. Nobody makes fried chicken like my Dandy did, Allah yarhamhu. He died when I was nine. I miss him. i grew up in a hard way. Dandy took good care of me.

I'll never claim my position, or lack of it, is noble. But I respect people enough not to decieve them by following some sort of party line and tell them something I don't mean just for the sake of showing a compassion I simply don't have much of. Accuse me of being undermature, fine. But, when I see my baby looking at me with sad eyes out of hunger, I feel compassion. As far as things that are abstract to me, its much harder. Perhaps its the cold calculations of cost-benefit, the absolute source of apathy. However sorrowful it may be, I think the reality is that there are many more people like me than not. People complain that the media feeds people not to care about certain issues designated as vital by $nefarious_force (insert world evil here).