Lately I have been rethinking my entire life plan. I used to think that by the time I was in my late twenties, I would have a husband, a family, a house, and a job that I loved. As I approach my 24th birthday, I have none of those things, not even any prospects. And as I look around at the world, I'm not sure that I want them anymore.
I have made comments to my parents in passing about never getting married or never having kids and their responses are always, "Oh, don't say that!" Part of it is the self-depreciating humor that my generation is famous for, but part of it is serious. Lately I've been feeling like the whole world is going to hell. Do I want to bring life into a world where we might run out of food in the foreseeable future? If I say yes, does that make me selfish for putting my desire to have a family above the well being of my hypothetical children? Is it fair to them to put them through potential suffering just because I want a baby?
Sure, we could turn it around in the next 10 years. If that happens, I might reconsider again. But the way things are going right now, I'm not particularly optimistic. Politicians seem to be more concerned with money than ever, and less concerned with the future, probably because they'll be dead before they have to face the consequences of their actions. Sure, there's been a huge youth movement, but some of those kids won't be able to vote for another 5-10 years so there's nothing to make politicians take them seriously except for threat of voting them out in the future.
I realize that sounds pessimistic, especially coming from someone who has studied political movements for the majority of their academic career. I realize the power of the people but based on what I'm seeing now, the power of the people doesn't seem to be enough. I've witnessed mass shooting after mass shooting and seen nothing done about gun control in this country. I thought for sure that Congress would do something after Sandy Hook, but no. And after our country somehow rationalized the right to bear arms over the lives of kindergartners, I knew that there would be little that could change that.
That's another thing I don't want to put my hypothetical children through. I've seen retailers release bullet-proof backpacks, architects create curved hallways and designated hiding spots in schools, teachers create special doorstops to keep a shooter from entering their classrooms. Everything but gun reform. Call me crazy, but I don't want to send my children to school every day when there's a chance that they could not come back that afternoon. I've been 15 minutes away from a shooting before. I had teammates that were trapped in a school with a shooter. Although I wasn't there with them, I felt their fear and pain. That's not the kind of thing you recover from overnight. It stays with you for your whole life. And I can't imagine the pain of parents that have had their children gunned down in a place that they thought would be safe.
This is something that generations before us have never had to deal with. Sure, there have been wars before and threats to America. But there has never been something that we haven't thought we could recover from before. We're currently at a point in history where if we don't make some concrete changes to the way we're living, the planet will reach a point of no return and it may become uninhabitable. Our parents never had to think about whether or not it was safe to bring children into the world. They wanted families so they had them.
It may seem cynical to think this way, but this is just where I'm at right now. Maybe I'm in my feelings but honestly I don't think it's crazy to think about your future like this. I could push through the cynicism but that doesn't change the facts of the world and pretending there's nothing wrong or assuming that it will get better is ignorance, and not the blissful kind. It's a hard thing to think about but I think we all have to start thinking this way eventually.
Comments