Recently as I was contemplating some of my family’s holiday traditions, I wondered exactly why we did some of the things that we did over and over each year. Sure, these traditions were brought back from previous generations and some had sprung up over the years, but the only suitable answer I could wring forward was these simple words:

“We’ve always done it this way.”

And that, my friends, is the root of all evil.

Not violence and corruption, not wickedness and dishonesty, no, the very core of evil in the world is complacency. And it’s slowly ruining us all.

We as human beings are stubbornly set in our ways to do things as they have always been done, never caring to change them for the betterment of individuals involved. And that, I believe, is what’s causing the problems that continue to plague society and likely will continue to do unless a drastic change is implemented.

Complacency is what’s causing continued pollution and environmental woes as the state of our natural habitat is deemed unstable, yet no movements are enacted to combat the heinous wastefulness and atrocious carelessness.

Complacency is at the root of world hunger, where huge corporations are content to sit back and watch as their pockets fill and peoples’ stomachs across the world do not.

The energy crisis is pervaded by a sense of malaise as major stakeholders in nonrenewable resources express the view that “someone else will solve it”. Complacency at its very worst.

Despite the immediate and extreme gravity of these examples, it is important to realize that only a small change must be enacted in order to solve or at least start to fix some of these large-scale issues. We must not be simply content to watch as the world dissolves around us. We cannot sit back as if our society and economy are nothing but mere actors in a special effect-laden cinematic experience. We must be vocal and active participants in our lives and positively impact the lives of others.

We must not be complacent. We must act.

I stress the immediacy of these issues because they, and other comparable problems that plague the planet at large, are issues that will not go away without speedy action. And that starts with the citizens of this earth, if we are to make it better for ourselves and our posterity.

Too many people are struck with an inability to act; they are beleaguered with a sense of wanting to solve problems combined with a feeling of hopelessness in actively accomplishing such an end. Someone else will do it.Someone else will help those people, save the environment, donate to worthy causes.

The truth is, they may not.

What if everyone in the world thought like that? A world like that would have no solvers of problems, but instead heaps upon heaps of problems that no one would ever take the time to solve.

Alas, that’s not a world I want to live in.

Take charge of our world. It’s the only one we’ve got, and despite its faults we can band together and solve them, starting first with ourselves.