What’s Happening to the “Wonderful World?”

By order of the new government, our children will learn much less than we ever knew. What they’re allowed to know will be designed to enforce obedience to the powerful and reduce independent thought. We’ll be encouraged to produce worker bees.

Rich or poor, people will have to breathe and absorb toxins that will degrade their minds and health.

The world will offer fewer places to relax as well as fewer places to just be yourself so mental illness will thrive.

Is this movement about feeling threatened? Aside from childish spite, then, why?

Think of the teens who vandalize parks because they don’t feel like they belong there…or cemeteries of people who were loved more than they are. Think of trends that hate and blame to avoid taking personal responsibility. Did you ever guess jealousy and resentment could become popular here in our beloved country?

Some of us don’t want to live in a world that grows progressively uglier and more dangerous. Many more will turn to drugs to make living feel more fulfilling. So when you see people standing in the streets in peaceful protest, desperate to build a better life not depression for their children, guess the reasons. They’re taking risks for values they refuse to throw away. We will increase our numbers—in public or in secret–as more and more of us suffer losses of home and jobs and friends and family. Eventually, the rulers will fall because they rule only by consent of the governed—our permission, and we’ll take it away.

Can the future be bright? Of course. We can admit and correct past mistakes and omissions without smashing what worked—if we want to do it. The harsh light of our present reality is revealing places where our society has traditionally nurtured hypocrisy that we can finally turn into compassionate progress. We can make education work harder to enable each of us to have access to a more fulfilling living that meets particular needs. We can used the intelligence and creativity of all of us to better life for us all. We can help those who don’t read well to hear simple truths on a fourth grade level, drowning out the propaganda and manipulative persuasion so more people notice what doesn’t add up. We can refuse to be bought like so much cheap meat or threatened into becoming less. We can grow up and make humankind proud and noble as we were meant to be.

Or not. Our choice.