What has the world come to? This is a question I end up asking myself every night before bed. As I brush my teeth, apply my copious amounts of facial creams, put on my soft pajamas, and send those final late night texts, I wonder what the hell is going on. Every day I feel as though I wake up to a new report about a bombing or some sort of attack. Every day there is the latest meme making fun of Donald Trump’s insane policies, which he surprisingly thinks will work. Every day I think about how complicated and hateful the world has become, how this isn’t the world I want my kids to live in. Even my baby brother, I fear for what kind of world he is coming into.
As a politics major, I am confronted every day with the harsh realities of this world. I am forced to go in depth to every detail. This semester I have been focusing on the atrocities happening in South America. Drug dealers, rampant poverty, paid mercenaries, and atrocious murders that our country turns its back to every day. It starts to bother you after awhile. It feels like the only way to clear my brain is the hour and a half I spend at the gym with my friends, at that point I’m too focused on not pulling a muscle and watching the cute guys lifting around me. One day though, I was running on the treadmill and watching the news channel the gym had put on. I saw an interview talking about the young people in today’s society. Young people for the longest time have never come out in large numbers to vote, I couldn’t tell you why. But this newscaster talked about how we are all wrapped up in video games, selfies, getting Instagram likes and retweets, how we want to share all we do except our political opinions. They basically said, my generation doesn’t care.
Wrong. Young people do care. We are told that we have ideals about how the world should be, but they will never come true. The world is cold and we need to accept that. Wrong again. They say young people talk a big game, but do nothing to change the world. Wrong again. As someone who has participated in several environmental and political rallies, I have been surrounded by thousands of young people speaking up for a difference.
At Ithaca College, where I attend, I can see the future workforce before my eyes. People entering this world wanting nothing more than love and peace. Young people who want to help heal our planet that is dying before our eyes, and I see none of these men and women in suits that sit in that big white building on the hill trying to solve anything. All it takes is one. One voice. One movement. To then be joined by millions. To then get their friends, and they get their friends, and so on to get to the polls and vote. To get them to buy reusable water bottles. To get them to march in the next civil rights rally. The idealists, the young people, hold the most power in this world. We are the ones who know what the world needs to be like, and we will be the ones to make it happen.
Next time you hear someone spewing hate or giving harmful words, speak up. I encourage you to speak your mind. As young people it is up to us to fix the past mistake, to leave the world better than how we found it. If you make enemies along the way, good. To have enemies means you actually stood up for something in your life. Whatever little thing you can do today, could make waves in someone’s life tomorrow. Through this thinking I have decided, and I encourage you to as well, ask myself a different question every night. As I lay in bed, pull up my sheets, and adjust my pillows to that perfect fluff, I have one final thought. Tomorrow, how will I change the world?
