Morality: A Rant · 2:16am Mar 8th, 2013
WARNING: Unless you're up for some inteligent conversation, best just leave this one alone.
Morality.
Good.
Evil.
Right.
Wrong.
We all have our own sense of good and bad. I have been raised to a rather straightforward sense of the two, respect your parents, be kind to people, yadda yadda yadda. This is what I believe in and I will stand by it with unquestioning loyalty. So that brings me to the cause of why I have even bothered to write this at all: When I look around at my generation with things like encouraged drug use, SWAG, YOLO, underaged sex, violence, and overall douchbaginess, I am utterly and truely,
Scared.
Why would I be scared, you ask? I'm glad you did. What I see when I look upon these people are not easygoing, carefree teens living life in a way that is more or less true, you do only live once, you don't get a second chance, so make the best of it. That's not what I see. What I see, is a generation of drunken, druged up delinquints that have thrown away anything and everything that their parents have (I hope, at least) attempted to teach them. I see people that can't plan anything for the next day, let alone think, even for a moment, on the future consiquences of their actions. I see the ugly, uneducated future, and it's slowly killing itself in alcohol poisoning, overdoses, suicide, and pregnancy to be either aborted or to have a child raised in a single-parent enviorment.
It is this that scares me, to think that this is the best the modern world has churned out and dumped on humanity will one day be the leaders of this country, leaders of the world. The doctors, the lawers, the police, the political figures that will affect our lives in one way or another, the people we will have to sometimes entrust with our lives. And they ignore reality and party, in some misguided, booze-filled dream that they will stay young and invincible forever. One day they will reap what they sew, and I wonder where I will be when it happens. Will I be successful? Will I be educated? Will I be standing beside them, or even one of them? I would like to hope that the last one is never going to be true, but life has a funny way of doing things. All in all, I am able to see past the parties, past the drugs, past the sex, and I see a future that will take all that humanity has built on level heads crumble to the inability of the future it raises to be it's successer.
But, dose this make me perfect? Dose this make me better than them? Am I somehow on a greater level simply because I stop to think? No. Absolutely not. Nobody and nothing in this world will ever be perfect, myself included. But I can live with it because I know that I don't live my life thinking that I'll be a teenager in high school forever. I'm going to have to move on and, while it scares the shit out of me, I'm going to have to do it. I'm going to do the best I can, and I just don't see any way in heaven or hell that my generation will be able to do the same. While I'm just pointing out the majority, it's not fair to the people that I KNOW are like me, able to see the ugliness of this generation of humans and hold themselves away from it. For these people, I have what little hope I have left in them.
Originaly, I wasn't going to post this, it was one of the thousands of failures-waiting-to-happen that I call "ideas" that ran about my head. But then I saw something that changed that. After school, I wait outside the band room near one of the two parking lots for my mom to pick me up from school because one, I have a lot of friends in band and two, it's the easiest way for mom to pick me up. As I waited, I observed a middle schooler walk up to another, both girls (there is a middle school a few blocks from the high school I go to) and I almost didn't dwell on it... until a large group of people that follow the creed of YOLO begine to gather around the two, highschoolers themselves. Soon enough, the two girls begin yelling at one another, saying every offensive word known to man. The girl getting yelled at by the approchers has her boyfriend step between the two. The approcher, being the stupid asshole I already could guess she is, continues her rant, eventually being stupid enough to attempt to swing at the girl she approached, with her boyfriend still between the two. At this point, a few good people have broke past the crowd and defused what could have erupted into a violent clash of misguided intentions (I heard the two boyfriends were going to fight each other rather than the girls themselves). With that, I felt like I had to appologize to the world for the idiocy of my generation and beg for them to not shoot me down from my future because the people I'm forced to call comrades are as stupid as to do things like this IN FRONT OF 3+ SECURTY CAMERAS.
So, I had to let out some steam, so to speak, and decided this the best way. Do you agree with me? Do you think I'm some fag loser? I don't care. I know what I believe is right.
Do you?
Look where we are now...
We've gone forward, our generations have not differed at all.
898538
Well spoken my friend. Technology may advance, but humanity only continues to slip backwards.
898642
No, you misunderstand what I was saying.
Socrates lived a long time ago, I'm not exactly sure but it was a few hundreds at least. He believed the younger generation was so stupid that they would be the end of us all, and yet we continued.
Make fun of who you will about the educational things, but just remember that the Wright brothers were high school drop-outs.
898671
I understand. But is my comment wrong?
898694
In ways it is true, but in others it is false.
898801
That depends on your faith in humanity. I have very little. People may joke about that, but I truely find it hard to say that humanity will do anything but run itself into the ground.
People, are by nature, stupid. We have evolved far too quickly for our own good and have all this technology of the 21st century, but the rational thinking of a 20,000BC caveman. We simply have not had the time for our brains to evolve beyond the times when we couldn't think about the future, because you had to make sure we got there. Back when you were lucky to get to 40, phrases like 'carpe diem' ( meaning, 'fish of the day', was more or less used to try and seduce chaste virgins) was actually pretty sound advice. Today, with our life spans approaching 100 years and more, we don't need it, but we still think that way.
Our genetics and general atmosphere are actually giving great lessons, because we are affected not just by our past, but by our present. Those who can learn to stay away, or truly control themselves with what they do, try to pass on the message, but combining the rebelliousness of the teenage years and the incomplete messages of YOLO and the such are basically a punch to the face of rational thinking. The problem lies in people being told, from a young age, to follow whatever dream they may have, live like they might die the next day, or just do what they feel right, corrupts the image of what the future is supposed to mean. I once tried to convince a friend of mine to stop smoking marijuana, he was on a low, but refused to stop for the usual reasons (I can stop whenever I want... after this next blunt).
He lost everything and actually blamed the fact that his parents raised him from a young age that 'Everything will work out'. He actually said there was a quote from a friend they had in stitching that they shoved in his face. It fully read 'Everything will work out if you do your best to do what is right by you, society, and the government'. It wasn't a great thing, but it was also taught to him when he was fifteen. He didn't receive the full message, he wasn't taught the full message, he was never made to understand. I used to not do homework for my classes (I could usually remember everything anyway) right up until I started to stop understanding what the teacher was trying to teach. This was, again, something I viewed as unimportant, simply because the only benefit I saw was my grade, not my mind.
Point: People nowadays need guidance, but thanks to our current environment with all this information, people feel they know everything (warning, hyperbole incoming) about nuclear physics, from the moment they hear E=MC(squared). We don't receive the full message until it is too late. Sometimes, we have to learn it by ourselves, other times, we simply didn't learn it because we thought we knew enough. Once again, we are stupid, partially because we are so smart.
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too many words