The Soap Box by Tom Lounges
(This month we have a guest editorial writer: Sarah Lounges)
EDITOR'S NOTE: This month, I have decided to let someone with something
much more important to say than I, utilize this editorial space - my daughter
Sarah.
She penned this opinion piece for her school yearbook, summing up the last
millennium and projecting thoughts on the next thousand years. Touched by
the optimistic view I saw through the eyes of a 14-year-old, I was impressed
that some of our younger generation still holds on to the dream of a world
where one day all people will live together in peace. Maybe there is hope
yet for us.)
The millennium! A new era is now upon us and all the terrible things they
said would happen once the calendars shifted back to double zeroes have not
come to pass. Instead of the dark foreboding days of system failures and
global chaos, the new millennium has brought a chance to start anew in many
ways.
By having avoided all the doom and gloom that had been predicted for this
point in time, in short, it is like getting something of a second chance to
do better than we - humankind - did in the last thousand years.
The best way to set about doing better things in the future, is to take a
look back and learn from our past mistakes and successes of the previous
millennium.
From a global perspective, the last one thousand years saw an awful lot
of human suffering. It saw the rise and fall of many civilizations and many
senseless wars waged for reasons long forgotten. It saw religious
persecution and racial hatred become a common way of life. It saw many
wonderful life forms - flora and fauna - disappear forever as mankind
plundered Mother Nature. The clean and healthy global environment that
existed for millions of years has eroded nearly to the point of exhaustion
during the last millennium, as ignorant and greedy people thought more about
their wallets than their planet.
In the last one thousand years we have also witnessed many good things. F
or instance, our nation was born; slavery was abolished; minorities and women
both got civil rights; and America became known as a communal melting pot of
cultures and people.
Then there was that historic "small step for man, giant step for mankind"
that was taken when astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human being to
set foot on the moon. That one significant event has resulted in space
shuttles, space stations and orbital laboratories, interstellar telescopes
and high-tech satellites, which do everything from beam sporting events into
our living rooms to shielding us from foreign missile attacks.
While many great things happened, sadly, so did many bad things. Our
country survived a bloody Civil War; Native Americans were brutally
slaughtered in the name of Western expansion; we engaged in two major World
Wars and suffered through several smaller conflicts in far off places like
Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf; we watched in horror as genocide was
practiced by the Nazi war machine in what has become called, The Holocaust;
we saw good people like John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King die from
assassin's bullets; and we endured the hard times of the Great Depression.
As a world people, we even cried together over headline-making tragedies
like those of the Titanic, the Edmund Fitzgerald and the Challenger space
shuttle, because they made us realize that for all our power and knowledge,
our fragile destiny remains in the Hands of a force greater than ourselves.
The lessons of the past must be remembered as we step into this new
millennium to forge a new beginning. We have been given a clean slate in a
sense, in that this is the start of a new era. We have been given a great
responsibility, because it is up to our generation to now set the wheels in
motion for what the next thousand years will be remembered for.
Do we want the history books of the future to look back in a thousand
years and see that we learned nothing from our past? Do we want this new
millennium to be filled with more wars and more hatred, or have we all had
our fill with that?
Do we, as the new generation, want to keep traveling down the path that
past generations have put us on, or do we want to make changes and be the
ones to pull the world out of the destructive spiral it is in?
I realize that bad things will happen, despite all the good intentions in
the world, but there is no reason to let those bad things override our agenda
to set things straight for what is now OUR world.
Visionary rock musician, John Lennon once asked his generation to
"imagine" and I repeat his challenge to my generation. Imagine what it would
be like to turn on the evening news and see positive stories being reported,
instead of the usual parade of murders, bombings, military battles, and
crimes that flood our senses every time we click on the remote.
Can such a thing ever be a reality? Sure it could. Will it ever happen?
That's really up to you. It can happen, but it will require that all of us
- you, me and others like us world over - put down our prejudices and look at
each other with fresh eyes. We need to put away our many petty differences
and rejoice in the uniqueness of each race, religion, nation and creed. We
need to learn that there is no one "right" answer and that different views
are a good thing.
If we can do that, then we can create a world in this millennium where
children won't have to be afraid of being shot at school; where elderly
people need not live in fear of leaving their homes; where there is a loving
and nurturing sense of community where people will not go hungry and
unsheltered; where gang mentality is a thing of the past; and where the ways
of war are forever forgotten.
We have it in our collective power to stop the hate crimes, racism and
prejudices that plague our world today. But the key is the word,
"collective", because it will take ALL of us working together to better the
world and to give us the kind of brighter future we want and deserve.
Whether we can attain this kind of world vision is doubtful, because as we
look back on the past, even the greatest peacemakers have never been able to
accomplish such a formidable task.
But I choose to keep believing in the dream that we can one day live
together in world of global harmony. As we enter this new era, let's prove
history wrong and that it need not repeat itself. We can take a stand and
make a difference, or we can stand by and watch our world continue to crumble
as the wars and hatred flourish amid our apathy.
The choice is entirely ours...let's pray we make the right one.
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