The world sucks and so do we
It’s easy to look at the world and think the whole place is going to hell in a handbag.
Bombs are being dropped in Syria and Iraq killing thousands, both civilian and military alike.
Millions of people are fleeing war-torn countries in search of new, safer lives but are instead finding only hate, prejudice and xenophobe.
Russia is hacking the US, China is battling their neighbours for land, and President-Elect Trump (which is still hard to come to terms with), is building a cabinet full of bigots, racists, corporate figureheads, and climate change deniers.
Things in the world have become so negative as of late that it’s almost impossible not to become negative ourselves.
Over time we have become cynical, jaded and apathetic to all of the chaos going on in the world, so much so now that we simply tune it out altogether.
Most of us have decided to just live our lives and try to ignore the world’s problems because, at the end of the day, we all know there is not much we can do about them anyway.
A small idea to create change
I believe this is why we are so frustrated by all the constant negativity in the world. Not because it’s everywhere, all the time (which, unfortunately, it is), but because we genuinely wish we could do something about it.
I mean no, most of us wouldn’t be able to solve world hunger on our own or be able to dial up Putin and convince him to implement a cease-fire in the middle east, but does that mean you’re completely helpless to impact the problems of the world?
What if, just for a minute, we put aside the insurmountable scale of the world’s problems and just considered the problems we all have in our own back yards. What issues could we effect there?
Are there are people in your town living below the poverty line or maybe even on the street? Does your community struggle with elderly care or does it face challenges supporting its at-risk youth?
What if, rather than feeling helpless and frustrated by our inability to impact things on a global scale, we all simply took steps to impact the small issues we have in our own backyards. What kind of ripple effect would this create?
Big change can start with small steps
Imagine what would happen if we all decided to ignore the BS of the world and instead focused on solving the problems we have on a local scale. Could that grow to change the world?
Rather than looking at issues like poverty, hunger, literacy, mental health, and the environment as just national or global issues could we take action to fix them right here in our own backyard?
By bringing the world’s problems down to our level they would no longer seem insurmountable, instead they’d be bite-sized challenges that we could all take on together.
There is no arguing that society is facing some pretty big challenges right now and that those challenges are more likely to get worse before they get better. The question is, can we afford to simply sit by helplessly and hope for it to fix itself?
During my Charity Challenge, I’ve seen the impact one person can make in their community so I don’t see a reason we can’t create that same impact on a larger scale if we just focused on one small problem at a time.
I would encourage you the next time you see an article, blog post or news story that really gets under your skin, to not simply ignore it and hope that the world’s problems fix themselves.
Go out and get involved, because although each of us may not have the power to change the world from the top, there’s nothing stopping us from changing it from the bottom.
