Slayings, suicides, heart attacks, teen killing teen

But I'm desensitized, my only reaction is an eye dilation

Shrugging as child dies from malnourished emaciation

I know how I became this jaded to the world as a whole

My dark imagination is bladed to protect my well-armored soul

From the images I've been saturated in since I learned how to pee

My growing compassion was castrated since I became tuned in to the distance of TV

I can't blame the media fully for my overall desensitization

They just take pictures and spool the images out over generations

And give us anchor people with intensely white teeth

Plastic smiles and programmed reactions to every tragic brief

I'm not even angry at having been robbed of my sympathy

It seems a relief to pass through my day without once sobbing in empathy

For the countless thousands that perish at the hands of others just like me

I feel almost elated as I cherish the deadly shield of my cold apathy.

But I don't know what it would be like to care

For my fellow man's pain, and want to be there

To try to take that pain away, let my walls slip

Rather than listening to, "isn't that tragic?" in a three second sound clip

How do I know what not caring has cost my humanity

If I can't care enough to want to alleviate even personal tragedy

Now it's like I watch reality from behind a TV screen

Nothing seems real to me, just another well-scripted scene

I'm numb to the touches of love and compassion

Which won't be commented on as apathy is now in fashion

I'm just another non-caring face in an ever-growing mass

A frightening amount of nothingness fading silently into the past.

-David "Dingo" Bleecher