My heart goes out to a lot of people today.  The last time I was this upset over an overseas tragedy was when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Sometimes you just can't help feeling that something isn't right.

I'm really happy that I don't live in Europe.  I'd like to visit some day, but the petty rivalries between Canada and the States are no comparison to the evil that lives between people and groups in Eastern Europe.  I can't even bring myself to read the news out there more often than not, and whenever I give in to curiosity and take a look at what my fellow Slavs are saying I find myself angry and bitter and emotional.  Sure, my education on the subject has been heavily influenced by my nationality.  As has everybody else' from out there.  It saddens me that we're all hypocrites in some sense or other, more so in that we can't change it.  It seems like everyone out there seems to know a completely different history, and none of those histories is more true than the others.  All histories are somewhat nationally and emotionally charged, and this is no secret (the winners write the history?  Only too true).  It's like a huge stalemate, where in affirming what we know to be true we deny something someone else knows to be true.  In a group of countries that have all historically been aggressive, brutish, and essentially inhuman to each other for no objectively good reason, no one is "better" than anyone else, no country is "better" than any other (though one in particular is likely to try to change that before any other).  Nationalities tolerate each other, some people love each other, but nothing I read from out there ever strikes me as genuine.  How can it be, with so little trust among nations?  And what makes this even more difficult is that I could not confidently say that any one country really deserves that trust in the first place. 

I broke down in tears when I woke up this morning, and within minutes heard about the plane crash in Smolensk that killed the Polish president and elite.  I'm not Polish, but I couldn't stop shaking and quivering as I watched TV Polonia for a few minutes.  I was a little afraid.  Maybe something in this situation, besides it being a terrible tragedy (and as has been alleged by many others, a sardonic sort of irony), really isn't right.  Or maybe it's just a little too close to home.