How the World Stays Together

XX How the World Stays Together XX

So everyone’s been talking about the end of the world lately. Haven’t you heard them talking? Or are you one of those people who ignore the worst and hope for the best? I congratulate you if you can do that effectively.

Anyway, the world, it seems, is ending. Everything’s going wrong so quickly. People are dying all over the world, yet our population is skyrocketing. Genocide still exists, racism is alive and in the heart of every American/European/Asian/Afrikan/Antarctican, disease sweeps across vast plains and kills millions, starvation is still happening yet obesity, one of the Western world’s biggest problems, is still considered a wealthy luxury by most.

No one remembers the wars of the past except for the ones we won. In a recent poll, hardly anyone in high school knows about the ongoing conflict in Yugoslavia/Kosovo/Bosnia/is anyone else claiming independence before it’s too late? No one remembers the Crimean war, except for those who fought in it. No one remembers that Israel technically probably should not be its own nation, considering it was land taken away from the rightful owners in an effort to place European refugees from their own war.

Global warming is killing polar bears like an organically-grown terrorist, and one third of the world’s frog species have vanished since the series “Planet Earth” came out and wowed people who watched the series on their new, toxic-waste-producing, plasma LCD televisions.

We rock out to people like U2 on our iPods and say we want to change the world when all we’re doing is creating an even bigger mess, because when those iPods die, smash open the back and see what’s inside. I recommend you keep it away from your mouth.

The music industry hates most consumers because we’re just too darn clever (aka, numerous and hard to keep track of) anymore. They can’t put everyone in jail for taking music that wasn’t supposed to be a product anyway, because if you took away the people, you wouldn’t have a business anymore.

Broken families exist in each and every country, and it is considered a rarity to see parents who are still together for more than ten years. Everyone considers the fifties to be the golden years of family but that just isn’t true. Most of our knowledge of the time is propaganda, and all sitcoms and shows broadcasted from that time showed the public family. Private familial wars were still waged, even back then. It was just harder to get out of marriage back then.

If your parents are one of the few couples still married and together, you are now the minority of family units.

But.

There are always the hopeful few. The people who don’t care quite enough to change the world, but are compassionate enough to know that the world isn’t going to end. We might end, of course, but not everyone. We’re like cockroaches anymore; we can survive through anything.

We still have time to raise families and to fall in love. We have time to learn and spread whatever wisdom our ADD brains pick up on for the most part. The weather might be getting worse, but we’ve learned to adapt.

We learned to build skyscrapers, and we learned to build homes. This thing we consider so sacred, this shelter-business, is just a place to rest. But by improving upon that shelter and making permanent residences, we have evolved from nomads into one of the only species on earth that tries to settle down in one spot forevermore.

All this new technology that surrounds us may have killed millions, but we are continuously working so that the very technology that murders will become the technology that saves.

Even if our actions are wrong, we always try to do what’s right in our minds. You could be the world’s next Bin Laden, but at least you believed in something. The faithless miss a very important part of the world. Even if it’s not religion, there’s always something in the world to believe in.

More high school students attend college every year, and that number will only continue to grow. Education has been said to be the world’s great leveler, and if that is true, then the more education we receive the more wise choices we shall hopefully make.

Places like Hallmark still exist, and even though it may be a store, it is always a warming place to be. You can never get enough cards from Hallmark, especially the ones that make you call up a friend you haven’t seen in twenty years and thank them and would they like to go out for coffee this very afternoon?

Babies are, on average, still born with ten fingers and ten toes, one nose, one head, a sex-determining organ, legs, arms, stomach, a neck, a mouth, and ears. In all cases that is wonderful considering the changes we have made to the way we live. You would think we’d have pollution recycling gills or something by now.

Trees continue to grow, and flowers have learned to survive in the cracks of sidewalks (another revolutionizing species). Dogs still bark at the mailman, and cats still take naps that we ourselves would like to take in their stead. Blockbuster movies keep coming to take us away from our problems and into the problems of others, something we seem to have an obsession with.

Even though we have too many chemicals, pills, and toxins in our body we’re at one of the healthiest stages in the history of humankind ever since the bible said most people lived to be three-hundred-years-old and such.

Our childhood has prolonged all the way into our twenties. We still get to play at work. We deal with too much traffic but that’s because we know what’s on the other side of that traffic is well worth getting through to.

We still dance and mingle, and despite what baby-boomers say, we socialize. The internet age has brought us many bad things, but I can guarantee that, twenty years ago, we would never have had opportunities to meet people all over the globe like we have today.

We live closer together, but we enjoy more privacy than ever (whatever you post on the internet is, by your own choice, very public). We’ve overcome diversity enough to live on the same street as our brothers and sisters of every single race out there. We volunteer more than ever because we have enough time nowadays, and we risk more to find love anymore.

So maybe the world is ending, but I have a feeling we’ll be around a lot longer than this planet. There’s this thing called the human imagination that I like to depend on, and I’m sure it will think of a way out of the end of the world before it happens.

Until then, live long and live hard. Enjoy the sun, as well as the moon. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth, too. You’ll never know how much you miss it until it’s gone.

Viva Forever.