Day 246: God Made Man, Man Made Hitler

This is a continuation of my previous blog: Sandy Vs Hitler.

We like to think we are powerless, that life simply "happens to us" and there's nothing we can do about it. People rape, murder and abuse each other because that's just the way we were made. We like to think we're powerless because thinking that we are responsible scares the crap out of us - we don't want to be responsible for this. 

This line of thought reminds me of a line from a movie, Cold Mountain: "People say this war is a cloud over the land, but men made the weather and then stand in the rain saying 'Oh shit it's raining!'". We say the world can never change, that it simply is the way it is, but the world has been adapting to change over eons, we are the ones who are unwilling to move from our positions.

We had the industrial revolution, which led to the use of fossil fuels and dangerous compounds on a global scale, when we realised how harmful our actions were, we simply said "oh well, it's too late now! And in any case, it would just be too expensive to change how we do things." and then carried on as usual, knowingly heading toward, well, the end of life as we know it.

We watch the news and see all these terrible things happening around the world and then we turn the TV off and climb back into our little holes. We think to ourselves "it's someone else's job to fix the world, I'm just a person trying to look after myself and my family.". The thought of survival is all-consuming, most of us are driven by our instinct of self preservation to the degree that considering other beings around us simply doesn't fit into our consciousness, neither does challenging the way we live. In order to change the world, we must challenge the way we live and look to those we share this world with.

If we do not change the way we live, there will be many more Hitlers, many more school shootings, many more wars, many more deaths, more suffering, more inequality and discrimination... The world will not change on it's own. Our society will not "magically evolve/ascend" - we must put in the work to make a change.

We are the authors of our lives - it is up to us to decide what the story will tell.