As children the world seemed so much bigger, so impeccable and wondrous. There were so many stars in the sky, so many trees in the Amazon, so many fish in the sea. Everything seemed to be far more simpler too. There were no touchy subjects that could be viewed from different perspectives, just wrong or right. With age comes understanding, and with understanding comes an ever present ache for that veil of innocent wonder, your old childhood ignorance.
Growing up, we lost sight of the stars and started to notice the lights of helicopters. Trees were chopped down, and the creatures of the depth were over fished. We've come to learn the world we live in is entangled in sketchy subjects nobody really wants to debate. These are just some of the simple facts we had to accept, a few of the contributing factors to our society that is typical. Our generation is a great generation. Or is it? We are the children of technology, of gadgets and a thousand different T.V. channels. Scraped knees and actual social interactions are things of the past. For that we have Twitter, Tinder, Facebook, Tumbler, Instagram, and endless line of apps meant to unite us through the web.
We are the generation of American obesity and Slim Fast commercials. We wear the medals of victorious matches that doesn’t match the scoreboard. Our music is oversexualized, advertising vulgarity and drugs and it would appear as teenagers we ate it up. Marijuana is now legal. Girls obsess over their figures and worry about whether or not they meet the ridiculous standards of unfit role models, such as the Kardashian's.
We willingly throw our hard earned money at surgeons to tame our negative body images. Clothes in stores have done nothing but shrunk over the years, covering up less and less. We poison our bodies with alcohol and inject ourselves with heroine. Rapist walk away without blame, and Planned Parenthood's are painted in shades of wickedness. We claim to be all about love yet all around us riots and massacres occur.
As a nation, we harbor torn feelings towards the police force for doing their jobs. We are careful not to offend anybody and claim no religion to protect ourselves from insulting any radical group. We blame guns for mass shootings and not the gunmen. Romance and chivalry is dead, alongside our morals. We no longer know the distinct difference between our hearts and our raging libidos. W
hat happened to undiscovered frontiers, to dirt roads and good old courtships? What happened to working hard and overcoming our fears? Those old days aren’t completely lost to us. There is a lot of promise in our world. Love has no limits now. We can love inter-racially, we can love same sexually, and women are finally grasping a sense of equality, but we are still so confined by our own self expectations and greedy prerequisites.
I believe there is an inkling of marvel still left to this world, but in order to find it we must break the pattern we have condemned ourselves to. We must go and find the wonders in ourselves, not in celebrities or supermodels. We must conserve our natural resources, not point fingers when oil spills or other accidents occur.
Even though you have found this link on social media we all must learn to limit how much time we spend with our devices and go outside and engage in conversations with people face to face. We should slow down and take the time to fall in love with one person, allow yourself to be vulnerable and see how much better it can feel to be loved by somebody, instead of plotting your walk of shame in the morning.
We should learn ALL life matters, and working hard to achieve something makes the victory even sweeter in the end. The world we live in, the New Americana is not a lost cause, there is still good people in it. We just need to work on not breeding hate, and start on being the best that we can be,
