I've been soaking up a lot of pop culture lately. It's a nice, somewhat odd feeling. It gives me stuff to think about, right before I lay to sleep. Well, if I DID sleep. I hardly get a wink these days.

One friend wrote on his blog that if he had one thing he could do before he died, his answer was "to be a vigilante for a day". I found that rather amusing - the craze over Batman is high following "The Dark Knight", and then there's also my rereading of the book "Watchmen" by Alan Moore. Both works, while very different in approach and theme, hit at one common yarn: how a hero isn't perfect, how he has weaknesses, and how those his or her heroism is not what the world need.

I, for one, think that we'd need a hero one of these days.

Last Tuesday (to my best knowledge), an Atenean by the name of Tara Santeciles, Batch 2007, took a jeep home when she was mugged. The brigands did not just take her things - they shot her in the head as they made off. It was the eve of her 23rd birthday.

She spent her birthday in Medical City's ICU, a bullet in her brain. She's still unconscious, on life support, and doctors debate on whether or not surgery can help her.

I first got this newsfeed from Nikki, one of my friends from A-Days. People who've met Nikki can attest to her being a bright and positive force. Shortly after hearing this news, she was shocked at how people could be so cruel to do something like that. Depressed doesn't cut it - she began to wonder why we should bother to hope for humanity.

It's one dark story, among other things I've noticed lately. Is it a sign of the times? I hear nothing but news of how gas is driving prices higher, how fighting in Mindanao has resumed, how Russians back separatists in Georgia, and how amid the spirit of unity in the Olympics, one man killed a coach of the US volleyball team before jumping to his death.

In my immediate friends, I hear rumors of how upset others are at one another. I hear varying reports on who's upset with whom, and for whatever reasons. It affects how we come together - I can't remember the last time I was at a party when some people didn't leave early to avoid the arrival of other people expected to show up. Some others find it harder to keep conversation for more than "hi's and hello's" - as though being associated with me were some kind of terrible thing to avoid.

At home, my own brother has forsworn any ties to me, and I, frankly have stopped caring. Nobody, not my sister nor my parents, dare mention his name around me, and me to him. We treat the area around one another as empty, dead space.

I remembered "The Dark Knight" and "Watchmen" - both illustrated how the people of the world were in a sort of sinking ship together. We see how the world spirialling into disaster, brought out "what people are really like". How, at the end, there are no puppet strings that control everything. It's only the random, nebulous happenstance of empty existence, and that we impose our own truth to it, because we can't accept that there isn't anything behind it at all.

What could I say to the people who are in this spiral of despair?

Shouldn't it be, that even as the world is heading to shit, we should do something? What little we could do anyway? After all, in the end, even if it's all going to be futile, we ought to have done what we could. Shouldn't that be how it's supposed to be? That we don't compromise. That we know what we stand up for, and what we find non-negoitable. And that we stick by it, even if it hurts, even if it's painful to stick by it. That we must never try to "pragmatize" morals, because then, as my Constitution professor put it, we prostitute ourselves for something less that what we really value.

I don't have a lot of answers. I just take you halfway, and you swim the rest.