Heavy in this skin

I HATE POLITICS. I HATE the idea of offices and prizes and the politicization of everything from food to literature to the body and to thought. I attended a rather informative lecture tonight by a prominent human rights figure and yet I left feeling so disillusioned. So heavy in my skin. I can't explain why exactly and I think that's what troubles me. On the one hand, leaning on corporations to adopt "ethical" practices and set standards in human rights (not only abide by them) seems on the one hand hopelessly idealistic and contradictory (downright antithetical to the capitalist profit lust) and on the other, quite practical. As the multinational corporations continue to replace nations at the center of global/economic and military power, they become a logical point of engagement if human rights is ever to be a universalized reality. How though can you trust a corporation or corporate entity to do what it promises any more than you can a nation? The Kyoto Protocols and the environmental sidestepping corporations have done in the face of obvious threats to the Earth leaves me with little faith in the "ethical/moral" compass of corporations. Nations are increasingly less able to check each other in a balance of power or are subject to the will of their people and global opposition to blatant human rights violations and environmental degradation. Corporations however lack those checks and balances even more than nations do. So I don't really like (or trust) the idea of engaging corporations in human rights activism, yet I can see why it is necessary and inevitable. I don't know. My idealism wants new lines to be drawn that gives international law true protection/enforcement of human rights over absolute state sovereignty. My cynicism has to figure out how this will occur. The urgency bothers me more than anything. With every person killed, tortured, dispossessed and disenfranchised, it makes me crazy to think that some damn commission (powerless commission) can do little more than hang their heads like flags draped over coffins and cry woe over preventable loss. Committees, Commissions, Sanctions, what are these words to those whose words are cut from their throats? Where to begin? Where to end? I don't know. I wish those who did have the words could leave a little for me. Peace.