What Is Wrong With The World?
War, famine, terrorism, AIDS, murder, rape and divorce are but a few things that each and every day we suffer as a race. Presently we try our best to curtail these problems in many various ways but mainly through prevention. Unfortunately these prevention tactics, although helpful in many ways, are not providing us with a cure.
There is a loss of hope at the moment of ever finding these cures amongst many people and this is in turn causing a loss of faith in society. People are discussing anti-capitalist ideas, conspiracy theories and there is a resurgence in punk attitudes. This is all well and good, and represents an acceptance of a problem, but it is the cure that eludes us and causes us to adopt nihilistic and destructive habits which eventually provide an unhappy end.
Punk was the most exciting thing to happen to us musically and thought-wise for many years. It was a realisation that things are going in the wrong direction and something important was being lost. What the punks failed to crystallize though was what this actually was – hence the end of punk after only 4-5 years. With nothing to believe in except that something was definitely wrong it soon became boring and the majority of people did not want to go out in a blaze of destruction like many of its champions. This meant that many things ended up carrying on as they were before punk happened, discredited as it was by its painfully sharp finale.
What is it then that has been lost? The simple answer is love. This sounds like some hippy rhetoric and, since that whole movement also suffered a highly ridiculed demise, I sympathise with doubters and cynics. Hippies believed in ‘free love’ but this correct ideal mutated into gang bangs and orgies and sex with anyone you wanted. That isn’t free love, it’s fear of genuine commitment to one other, and this, along with new media allowing us to witness more of the worlds problems first hand, has resulted in disbelief.
All is not lost however. Despite the many wrongs in our world we have still come a long way over the last few centuries in terms of a better and safer society. What is needed now is a peaceful revolution of ideas. Rather than fighting our problems in order to prevent them we need to apply the principles of love such as understanding and forgiveness in order to work out why we have these problems in the first place. Only by doing this can we devise a cure and so progress as a race into our future.
There is a loss of hope at the moment of ever finding these cures amongst many people and this is in turn causing a loss of faith in society. People are discussing anti-capitalist ideas, conspiracy theories and there is a resurgence in punk attitudes. This is all well and good, and represents an acceptance of a problem, but it is the cure that eludes us and causes us to adopt nihilistic and destructive habits which eventually provide an unhappy end.
Punk was the most exciting thing to happen to us musically and thought-wise for many years. It was a realisation that things are going in the wrong direction and something important was being lost. What the punks failed to crystallize though was what this actually was – hence the end of punk after only 4-5 years. With nothing to believe in except that something was definitely wrong it soon became boring and the majority of people did not want to go out in a blaze of destruction like many of its champions. This meant that many things ended up carrying on as they were before punk happened, discredited as it was by its painfully sharp finale.
What is it then that has been lost? The simple answer is love. This sounds like some hippy rhetoric and, since that whole movement also suffered a highly ridiculed demise, I sympathise with doubters and cynics. Hippies believed in ‘free love’ but this correct ideal mutated into gang bangs and orgies and sex with anyone you wanted. That isn’t free love, it’s fear of genuine commitment to one other, and this, along with new media allowing us to witness more of the worlds problems first hand, has resulted in disbelief.
All is not lost however. Despite the many wrongs in our world we have still come a long way over the last few centuries in terms of a better and safer society. What is needed now is a peaceful revolution of ideas. Rather than fighting our problems in order to prevent them we need to apply the principles of love such as understanding and forgiveness in order to work out why we have these problems in the first place. Only by doing this can we devise a cure and so progress as a race into our future.
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