When I was 12, I started volunteering in a local animal shelter. I thought it would be neat to help needy animals find good homes, to get to work with them all day. Instead most nights I went home in tears.

I went home in tears because yet again I had watched an animal so terrified of humans that it couldn't even move be put to sleep. Because I had watched another animal so physically multilated that it wasn't even recognizable be put to sleep. Because I had failed, yet again, to socialize an animal, because that animal had terror of humans so imprinted on it that no amount of time would fix it.

Stories like this one remind me of my year there, and I am not surprised. I wish I could be. I wish to every God I have ever heard of that I could say this shocks me. I wish I could say that I believe that some day the world will be a better place.

But I don't.

I wish that I could say that I believe, maybe in my lifetime, maybe in my children's, but someday that the world -will- take a stand. That it -will- say with one clear, loud, undeniable voice "THIS IS WRONG". But I don't. I can't.

Because every time I see an 8 year old African girl on 60 minutes talking about how her rapist thought raping her would cure him of A.I.D.S, I'm reminded of holding a kitten as it died because someone punctured it's eyeballs for amusement.

Because every time I see stories of Rwandan women being gang-raped, or Afghanistan women stoned in the streets for leaving their brutal abusive husbands, I'm reminded of the American statistic, that one women is raped every 30 seconds.

So yes fr0z3n, the world around you isn't as good as you thought it was. It's a shithole, and it's getting worse.

It's not going to get better. Not until it becomes more expensive to our government, and all other governments, and our businesses and all other businesses, to ignore it than to do something about it. Till it costs them more to pretend the problem doesn't exist, than to fix it.

Shaq made more for one Nike advertisment, than their entire Indonesian workforce in a year. It's cheaper to leave people on welfare, than to give them the training to work. It's cheaper to put people in jail, than to create early intervention programs to keep them out of jail in the first place.

I wish I could say I believe this will change.

But I don't.

-Keisha