[Seattle, Washington]Picture this.
It’s 2020 the world is burning literally and figuratively around your ears.
The Golden Gate Bridge glows red as it stretches over the Bay, and the famous tourist location fades into the past as the future of technology grows looms brighter.
California is on fire. Oregon is on fire. Washington is on fire.
The Pacific Northwest of the United States is set aflame and for once it’s not because it’s blazing the path to the future for humanity.
Instead, San Francisco is consumed by the rising costs of living. Portland is subsumed under an inferno of fury from racial prejudice. Seattle is choked by the clouds of smoke echoing from both.
That’s the figurative bit.
National parks disappear under the weight of lightning strikes. Hidden fires burn underground even as firefighters battle uncontrolled blazes on the surface. Homes disappear in ashes and property that millions of dollars were spent on vanishes in an instant.
This is today. This is reality.
I’ve just come out of a two-day break drowning myself in a 59 episode long Chinese drama in an attempt to flee from this.
And all I’m left feeling is more empty, hollow, and desolate.
The momentary kick from watching people fall in love, fall apart, and conquer their challenges fades quickly.
The lasting reminders of what is happening around me don’t go away.
Belarus is in an uproar as they rise against President Lukashenko who has reigned supreme for decades. A bright moment overshadowed by the horrors occurring to protestors as they fight for democracy.
China is once again purging those who don’t fit in quietly, bypassing judgment from the world. The Uighur population is crushed and their culture destroyed as President Xi Jinping continues to bring China to glory on the global front.
The United States is a chaotic landscape divided in half by political ideologies which only become more extreme as technology advances. The poor lose more while the rich climb higher and the income gap only increases.
Russia poisons an opposition leader to President Putin and Germany issues a warning. Russia continues to unapologetically hack into other governments. Taking advantage of the lawless landscape that the Internet provides as a haven of information, both real and fake.
Countries are more opposed to opening borders than ever, and for the first time in over a score, there are worldwide bans on flights from specific nations.
Across the world, there are more natural disasters popping up year by year as global warming takes its toll even while people continue to steadfastly deny its existence.
It’s expected that by 2050 we will be on a fast track to irreparably damaging the earth with no way to hit the breaks.
Question is, will it be the fire, the air, or the water that ruins us first?
Fires rage across the United States and Australia has taken a severe hit as well recently.
Air pollution is at highs never before seen as air quality indexes continue to issue orders to stay indoors.
Oceans rise, empires fall is not only a quote from Hamilton now, but the reality we face as sea levels continue to grow higher and Venice is soon to become the next Atlantis.
Maybe I’m overwhelmed by the vast amounts of ghastly news which streams in daily to my iPhone X, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is our reality.
This is what we have to determine how to face and tackle so it might become something we can live with.
One way is to turn away from it all, continue living in escapism searching for the next high from Netflix’s Top 10 shows, or the latest re-runs of last year’s football games.
But the other is to expose yourself to others, share your thoughts, open your mind, and listen.
Don’t get defensive, hateful, or interrupt them because you disagree.
Show them the respect that you would like in return as fellow humans struggling to deal with an increasingly mad world and create discourse.
Dialogue is the only way for us to move forward and determine what issues there are and how we might resolve them.
It creates drama because we are a species of social individuals who have our preferences, but it also creates an opportunity for those of us who could be more but never got the chance.
I think the craziest part of what I’ve written so far is that these are the issues happening without even including the worldwide pandemic hitting us at this moment.
No wait, I’m wrong. The craziest thing of all of this is that everything I’ve mentioned is problems that can be fixed by us. We can avert and minimize these disasters, not as “I” but as “we.”
