Thursday, March 29, 2012

Shoveling Poop


I’ve often wondered how our race of people could stand to do some many little things. There is so much in the world today that needs more attention. For example, why are we sooooo obsessed with fashion styles or TV shows or movies? Why should we delve deep into a passion? What good could it really being doing if it doesn’t bring much attention to the hardships in Africa or the poverty in third-world countries? How is it that so many people dedicate their entire lives to World Concern while others dedicate their entire lives to selling products on a world wide scale?

Again, my wandering mind thinks of how many cruel and terrible things there are in this world and why people just have to be those things. I can’t believe how flawlessly flawed we are. When I see such awful actions done by people in our society I always think: how could they stand to do anything like that? It must be because they were so desperate, or lost, or they couldn’t possibly have realized what they were doing. Its mind boggling still to think that if we were to somehow take all the porn out of the world, then what would we do with the multitudes of prostitutes that are without a job? How could we simply leave them unemployed with nothing to fall back on? But how could we allow for such vulgar behavior? It’s becoming clearer to me that life just can’t be perfect. Now I know what you’re thinking: Keelin! The Bible even says life’s not perfect, life pretty much sucks and you’re just putting this together now? Well no, I’ve know that for a long time; however, it’s the fact that we can’t even do good things without hurting something else in the process. It’s just been more of a realization that our government can never be perfect, that we’ve been striving for this blameless, genius, problem-solver of a president and it’s never going to happen. And I don’t even have to write this from a religious stand point. Government workers don’t think every morning before heading to their job: I’m going to make everyone happy today and I’m going to make the problems of our today disappear for tomorrow’s generations. Oh! And if by some chance I get to decide between the people’s needs and my family’s, I’m definably going to choose the people. This isn’t to say they are all corrupt and evil, but no one thinks that way. It’s not even possible to achieve what they’d be wishing for, solving one person’s problems can add to someone else’s pile. Life has got to be a game of compromises, you win some and you lose some but we try and make the loser as comfortable as possible. It’s hard to tell someone that a loved one died because someone else’s loved one had a better chance of living. How could one choose to save another, without feeling the guilt that they let the other down?

 My realization is so new because as I surround myself with news, I can see myself questioning the choices of others, I can see myself angered by the stupidity and malevolence of others, and I can see myself crying over the hurt of others. Things happen every day that I have no control over and can never hope to have control over. It just hurts my head to think about all the good I think I might be doing and turn around just by the slightest degree and see an even greater pile to clean up. This realization is hard to wrap my mind around, I want to proclaim that our world isn’t perfect and we’ll just have to agree to disagree, but I can’t tell a child in Africa that things aren’t going to change because we couldn’t settle an argument. Be my guest if you think you could.

So, ending my rambling and coming around full circle, when I see a doctor saving the life of a pony when no else would, I think to myself, why are we spending so much time and energy and skill on something like that? We could be shoveling more poo that actually does something. If we aren’t going to get far in helping people at least were helping some people right? Shouldn’t we be putting our efforts into life-changing events and fund-raisers? What if the world actually switched to reusable water bottles and stopped using plastic? We could save the Earth from more pollution, but what about the people who rely on the plastic industry? What can you tell them? And so, I had another realization: people save a pony or get deep into their passion because it adds just a little bit of good to our overwhelmingly bad world that we must live in. It’s like we’re creating a brochure for Planet Earth: Come visit us! We have overpopulation, poverty, terrible air, murderous beings, war upon retched war, our economy is completely sunk and to top it off: half of us don’t really even care. However, we also have this astounding connection between us. We come to each other when Mother Nature decides to thrash us around and we put ourselves in harm’s way so that our neighbor’s family might be saved. We have a worldwide community that is called The Internet and we can create things beyond your imagination. We learn and love and yes, we hate; but what we decide to do with our life is completely our own choice and we’ve been proven to amaze in some incidents. Not all of us take for granted what is put in front of us and most importantly we try to make our world a better place, we take care of simple, sometimes stupid things yes, but it’s only because we want something good to come out of everything else we do.

My aunt says before each of her basketball games: take care of the little things and the big things will follow. I’m pretty sure this only applies to basketball, but then again, maybe not. We all have a great and terrible job to do here, but I think you can add a spoon full of sugar to the medicine and it’ll go down in a slightly easier way, even if you have to do it for every spoonful of that dang gross drug that you have to gulp down with your nose pinched. ;)

SO I guess that when we do stupid stuff, when we have fun, when we enjoy our good fortunes, we do it-not to rub it in others faces- but to put a little good so we can handle the bad.  





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