The Solution to all our Problems

The more you learn about the world and our problems, the less naive you become. Just watch the news once a week, with time it may become hard not to loose all hope in humanity. For a while, I did start to loose hope in the human race. According to Will Smith, we live in a world where a girl was arrested on spite for throwing flour and Kim Kardashian, yet the man who killed Trayvon Martin is still free. Every day children are being sold as slaves to make our cocoa beans, our clothing, our coffee, our product. There’s another high school shooting every year. We have people marrying for money instead of love. We love things and use people, when it should be the other way around. How do we fix all these problems? Money? Science?  The solution is simple: Love. As a society, we need to get out priorities straight. Every day we do such horrible things to one another, we say such hateful things about one another without even realizing, or taking the time to even thinking about what we are releasing out into the world. This is because of our individualistic values. We care so much about ourselves, gaining more power and more money, we’ll do anything to gain more of it. To gain more power and more money, we need to apparently step on other people to get to the top. However, we are human beings, we are the highest of intellect of any other species, weren’t we made to show compassion, sympathy, and love for others? That is our essential nature. So why then is it that people in this day and age, and for hundreds of centuries can easily step on one another, hurt one another without even a second thought. It’s not just our individualistic values alone; it’s the fact that as a society, we sometimes tend to objectify one another. When you objectify someone you are therefore seeing them as less than human. By seeing someone as less than human it then becomes easy to walk all over them, to hate them and to say and do horrible things to them.

So the solution is love, and apparently we haven’t been loving each other enough because we tend to objectify one another. But why do we objectify one another in the first place. Like I said earlier, it has a lot to do with our hunger for money and power. Yes, that can explain why a lot of powerful people in the world objectify one another, but that is not the explanation for everyone. Again, the world is not black and white, there are so many different causes for why people act the way they act; but my is to explain things in the simplest way possible. I really believe that not knowing one huge cause to what is killing our society. We don’t understand one another, so it’s easy to objectify them as less than human. As humans we all come from different cultures, different religion, backgrounds and upbringings. No two people are the same, yet as humans we do not like the unfamiliar. We want to cluster everyone into different groups/stereotypes. Again, by throwing someone into a stereotype, you are dehumanizing them without really even actually understanding them. So we throw all these stereotypes at one another (which usually aren’t positive), without even taking the time to get to know one another. We just see each other as different, we don’t understand and so we build up dislike for what we do not know. If we did take the time to learn about one another, walk into another person’s shoe’s whether it be someone from another ethnicity, culture, class, gender or ability, we actually start to understand them. A good example to explain this would be colonialism of black people in America. The white upper people created a stereotype for all black people- dumb, dirty, lower, criminals and then threw all black people into this stereotype. They seen that black people were different from themselves, threw them into a stereotype and developed a hate for them- without even taking the time to understand; and when you do take the time to understand you start to realize we are all human, and we are more alike than different.

                For centuries, our media has been selling us this idea that happiness come from money, beauty, consumption and power. However, at the same time the people with all these things are the most miserable. Our society is getting more and more, yet still no one is happy. This is because we have forgotten the most simple, basic form of happiness that people have been yearning from the beginning of time- Love- and not just romantic, pop culture love, just basic love. Love for all human beings. When you take the time to understand one another, you can start loving one another; this also works the other way around. When you think about some of the most horrific criminals of our time, you can always find one basic commonality among almost all of them; they were deprived of love. When we don’t get love, and don’t give love we naturally develop the opposite of love- hate. We dehumanize one another, build hate and hurt one another.

Going back to my grade 10 English assignment, I remember my teacher asking whether society is essentially good or evil.  I ask the question again of whether or not as human kind’s essentially good or evil, still believe that all human beings are born essentially good. Due to our circumstances and up bringing, we do tend to do evil things. But when we start on the path to understanding one another, and hopefully towards even embracing one another we can develop love. 

Source:  Peter Trimming through Tumblr. 

What do you guys think? Am I crazy, was this really cheesy? Probably. I read a really good book that helped inspire me with my thoughts, called The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. Feedback would be awesome. Ta-ta for now!

-Fadia