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Your Values Demand it by Trevor Griffey |
I talked to someone who told me that the United States is spiritually corrupt and that she plans to move to New Zealand and start a self-sufficient organic farm with no animals, no money, no children, and leave no legacy.
I talked to someone who said that there is no use seeking justice until there is a series of worldwide revolutions.
I talked to someone who said the most world changing activity is to take care solely of one’s self and one’s close friends.
I talked to someone who told me the world is too horrible a place to bring children into.
I asked five people what the world would be like in a thousand years and found that not one of them believed humanity will continue for more than five hundred years.
These people are all white, relatively wealthy youths from the United States. They live better now than kings could ever have hoped hundreds of years ago: they have cheap and comfortable clothing; access to inexpensive arts and crafts; cheap and abundant varieties of food from around the world; heat, air conditioning, running water; opportunities for world travel; great health and sanitation; and inexpensive entertainment. They live in the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known, belong to its elite, are getting an education most would see as an incredible privilege, and yet have morose, helpless worldviews. Drowned in luxury, immersed in excess, these predominantly irreligious people anticipate the coming of an apocalypse in which most will suffer and few, if any, will be redeemed.
Why? Because they know that humanity’s current lifestyles, especially those of US citizens, will wreck the planet and everything on it if they continue. Our air, our water, our land, are all being polluted at rapid rates, making the world inhospitable for the poor and for wildlife now, and for everyone later. To compound problems, demand for such activities is increasing as industrialization and population growth continue in some countries at unheard of rates, and in almost all countries at unhealthy rates. See "Where We Stand," page twelve, if you don’t believe me.
The question is, ethically speaking: how can one live in a world of decay? How does one live in a world in which following the path of least resistence, or the system, is increasing rather than decreasing suffering and destruction?
When asking people this question, I have gotten many responses which said that it would be nice if we could do something, but we can’t. The issues are too big for us and are out of our control. The best thing to do in such a world is to escape it as much as possible in attempts to create a life of value for one’s self. The government, they told me, should do something to stop environmental destruction and the wanton creation of suffering, but, they told me, it won’t.
This is a morally bankrupt answer. To live a life of value is to act upon one’s values. If one has values, then there will be aspects of the world which conflict with them. Shall an imperfect world make us give up on it before we have ever dared to act--dared to live? Shall we be so scared of defeat that we will deny that which is most sacred to us? No. We must persevere. We must do battle against what we believe to be wrong, regardless of the result. We must do what is called "going out of our way" to act on what we feel to be of value, or it has no value at all. To use one’s privelege to escape the suffering one inflicts upon millions is to assert one of two things: one has given up, or one doesn’t care. I cannot argue with those who don’t care, only resent them. I speak to those who have given up on the care they feel for the plight of humanity. Become whole. Assert yourself to whatever degree you feel impelled to.
If you think you live in a world of shit, you have three choices: use your positive sense of the world as a means for social change, stop acting to create change but give up your values in the process, or die. The last option sounds harsh because it is. You are your sense of value. If you don’t act on your values, you’ll never make a mistake, you’ll never learn, and hence you’ll never live. For when you stop learning, when you stop failing, when you stop trying, you’re dead. Your body may not be decomposing yet, but your senses are dull, your passion and your essence are extinguished.
Do not expect the state to take care of our problems for us. We do not live in the kingdom of an absolute monarch. We live in an imperfect democracy. The sum total of United States’ citizens are more or less the state. The state reacts to people’s anger, their fears, their calls to arms, but only to those people who make themselves heard. Do you vote? Do you follow the Congress? If you expect the government to act, you have to make it act. Like action to save the environment, change won’t happen as a result of just your actions, but the kind of change you want can’t happen without them either.
You don’t have to devote your life to saving the environment in order to help. You just have to try, and keep trying, and make a concerted effort in your every day actions to make change a part of your life somehow--that is, if you care.