I thought I'd update my journal since I have actually been feeling better. I still have a chest infection, which in this weather can drag on for long, but at least I am getting better.

Every time I fall ill lately I spend it watching shonen anime. Last year I watched Bleach, this winter it was InuYasha and now it was Naruto's turn! I was actually really curious about Naruto since I see so much Naruto fanart here! The point is, I really enjoyed Naruto and now i can understand why it has such a huge crowd of fans. What I really liked about it though was that the characters change a lot throughout the anime. They start off as completely different people and you can actually see them progress and mature!

Out of the lot - because there are A LOT of interesting characters - the one that got my attention the most is Gaara. He is a complete sociopath. He had an extremely traumatic life, he has lost all sense of sympathy for other people and all he is interested in is killing. He needs to kill to confirm he is alive. To most of us Gaara's way of thinking and behaving seems like fiction, but unfortunately it is not. He reminded me of the story of two twin guerrilla boys I had read a few years back. They had joined their guerrilla army at age 10 and by the age of 12 (same age as Gaara) they were leading it. They were ruthless and vicious and had committed numerous atrocities. I don't know what has become of them, but reading about them make me really sad, to say the least. There are so many places in this world were violence is the only way to survive. What sort of life had those boys led that made them become the way they were. If you removed them from that sort of a life, would they change? However, even if you did try to make things better for them by removing them from that sort of environment, I am sure another 10 would turn up, ready to take their places.

What I am trying to say is that we are embarrassingly unaware of the political situation in other parts of the world. All we care about is ourselves; we never stop and think that these things happen because we allow them to happen. We are so good at looking the other way, but if you think about it we are all responsible for what those boys-and everyone else that has suffered like this- went through and for what they have become. They carry the weight of our greed, since it is the needs of the ‘modern world’ that force them into those lives.

We have created so many little Gaaras. When will this stop?