If 'normal' is putting up with all of that crap, I'd rather be an aberration.
'Cause living like that is an aberration. It's fucking wrong. People should not live with that. Being beaten is not normal. Being raped is not normal. It's not fucking brand new shampoo.
It's fucked.
I hear you. I don't have much to say, but this little bit that I do have is very important...
"Don't give up"
It may sound a bit corny, but the cynicism we see everywhere is not good for the world. It's important to be skeptical of corporations, but a mindset of cynicism tends to lend itself to a mindset of inaction, which just allows those problems to happen. We need people who are still willing to fight the good fight, and although you may not change the whole world on your own, you may change a small part of it in a small way. And that, would be worth it...
NINJAED (By a lot actually. Holy, this took a long time to write)
And everyone thinks it is. But the people who want to change it don't know where to start. "Change starts with you" becomes tiring quickly when being you realize being a good person in a community doesn't affect anything outside, and the effect within is marginal. Two Bay12ers I speak to have different opinions on it, but I can't remember either of them telling me where to start changing things, and thoughts related to why neither of them have an answer really hurt my idealism, but I brush it off because the state of things is intolerable.
Well, I fell a bit silly for writing the stuff above because this paragraph essentially grills me, but I still stand by what I say. My personal recommendation though would be to read the biographies of famous charity people such as Martin Luther King Jr. , Gandhi, and Craig Kielburger. They may not have fixed all the problems in the world, but they made a difference. Then again, I have no idea how far you can go without leadership skills.
Even if you don't have leadership skills, still don't give up. Even though you may not be able to change the world, we will never run out of Kielburgers. Eventually, someone will step in and make the world a better place, then someone else will step in and make the world an even better place, and this cycle will continue until the world becomes a place you are happy with.
Maybe that sounds
really corny, so let me counter that with a bit of cynicism. The world will never be perfect. In your lifetime the world won't even be good (depending on how you feel about it). This is a fundamental truth that you will have to accept. This isn't anything new, people have had to deal with this fact for generations. For example, think of the people who will lament the technologies they never got to live to see. But they managed to carry on and enjoy life regardless. Even though you may not live to see the world meet your standard of good, you will live to see it become better.
For some of you out there, that last sentence may be very hard to believe. What about the greedy banks taking over america, what about the over-saturated job market, what about the coming of the new gilded age? As the Internet grows, so does the awareness of the crimes these banks commit, and even the banks themselves know that if awareness of them spreads, then they won't be able to continue their activities (as long as we live in a democracy that is). For the job market, I don't have any answers (I guess the cost of having lots of unemployed youth will eventually outweigh the costs of fixing the job crisis?). For the new gilded age, the old gilded age lasted only 30 years. There is no reason why this one would be longer (especially with the internet).
Anyway, now that the cynical people have been addressed, let's go back to the world becoming better. If you are in the right state of mind and look around you, you will see that the world is becoming a better place. Technology is constantly improving, crime rates are falling (except sex-crimes unfortunately, from what I've seen we haven't successfully figured out mental health awareness yet), we are getting closer to gender and race equality, and much more. If you look at history, you will notice a trend towards the world getting better, minus a few bumps in the way (Soviet Union, Nazi regime, Crusades, Black death, late adoption of the steam engine by several millennia).
So what do you do about the problems that still exist? This is gonna become personal and philosophical and not backed by much evidence anymore, so bear with me. My personal attitude is this, do whatever you can to help with these problems, but accept the fact that you can't make them go away completely (especially if you don't have leadership skills). Even though it may be easier to give up, don't because you just become part of the problem. You have to learn to see the beauty that world exists in the world now (rather than focus on the beauty that isn't there yet), as well as to accept its flaws.
Anyway, that's mostly all I wanted to say. Perhaps its corny and maybe you don't agree with the final paragraph, but ultimately it's your decision about to choose the way you see the world. Maybe you see the world as more nuanced than I do and if so, go ahead!
So, you guys heard me talk about how the world is slowly getting better, but I want to add one more thing to that. Remember when I said there are sometimes bumps along the way? Well right, now the environment is our biggest bump. With enough time, we can recover from bumps (took us 30 years to escape the gilded age), but if the environment catastrophe is as bad as I think it is, then we may not have that time. I believe in the possibility that when a generation finally mans up to tackle it, it may already be too late and we might never recover.
The way I cope with this is by not thinking about it too much, and by being environmentally friendly (honestly, I need to get better at this. If I was truly environmentally friendly, I would go vegan or insectivore, but I'm just a human and as a human I have flaws. I don't have all the answers)
Sorry for the Wall-of-text. Feel free to debate with me in the comments.
Live to fight oppression from the shadows!
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14845607 times)