The Good Samaritan

So I've been thinking a lot about the way I am perceived by and treated my peers at the moment, often questioning wether I have friends and if I even need them. Because I often feel like I'm taken advantage of, misunderstood, used for other people's amusement. And meanwhile I sit there, being polite, holding doors open for girls, trying to be a good student. And I'm completely ignored and unrecognised. Why bother? 99% of these students that I pass in the hallways will amount to jack shit when they leave school. Am I doing myself any favours by trying to ally with these people. Am I being unfair? Judging these kids at such a pivotal but confusing time in their lives? I thought this was why we need friends; to help us on our way. I thought I was helping...

I'm not religious much, although I've read quite a bit of the Bible; I find it's curiosity more than faith, and it occurred to me that there's a parable that fits my predicament quite well:

There was a Jew, who was traveling by foot from Jerusalem to Jericho. At some point during his journey, men of ill intent happened upon him, robbed him of everything he had, right down to the rags on his back, and beat him half to death. While the traveler was dying in the road, a Levite saw him lying there and crossed to the other side, turning a blind eye. The next day, a rabbi did the same. In the evening of that same day, a man from Samaria who was traveling along the road stopped for the dying man and carried him on horseback to an inn, where he healed the man's wounds with oil and wine, and then sent him on his way. The Samaritan had nothing to gain from doing this, he did it simply because the man was his neighbour.

For a long time, I thought my fellow students were the ill fated traveler, wounded and confused on a long and tiresome road, and I was the Samaritan, who nursed the man back to health. But I am not the Samaritan. Or the Rabbi, or the Levite. I am the ill intent, that set upon the traveler, on a road that he should not have been on.

They say that everyone deserves a happy ending. That everyone deserves a shot at redemption. I say that the people who wronged me have had their chance! That they do not deserve a happy ending! They deserve to drown! In their filth! They have left me on a long and confusing road, bleeding half to death, with no Samaritan to heal my wounds.