Do You Ever Wonder?

Do you ever wonder why the world is the way it is? Do you ever look up and ask yourself, why can’t some people provide answers for what’s out there while others with the same amount of formal education offer a completely different understanding of questions that have been pondered for millennia? Do you ever see tragedy reported on the news and ask yourself how can people possibly justify these actions? Not only that, how can people be so violently damning of those of us that do sympathize with the victims and the community affected by these actions? With our vast connections to one another and the information circulated between us regularly its nearly impossible not to wonder what the hell is going on in the world.

The thing is, all of us are affected by so much of what we see yet few of us actually take time to process most of it, and even fewer seem to actually comprehend it at all. Let’s just be real here for a moment. We’re living in a time where so many things are unprecedented that we can’t truly understand how we’re supposed to react and in what manner those reactions affect all that is around us. We’ve never been seconds from connecting to thousands of people who share their lives as they do like this before. Everything from the telegram to the first text message may have been steering us in this direction but none of it could’ve actually prepared us for all of this… Could it have? As each day passes it seems like we’re traveling further into uncharted territory in starting to realize things that we simply didn’t have the tools to delve deep into before now.

Again, let’s be real here. There are people who believe the earth is flat, just like there are people who believe Jesus was white, as well as those who believe human beings were the spawn of alien experimentation and also those who believe we evolved from primates. There are people who believe Satan is their savior and there are past civilizations that believed things we don’t even believe are true because we’ve been conditioned by a variety of institutions that are designed to deny without questioning. Its for these reasons so many people can’t seem to make heads or tails of any “conspiracy” brought before them because they lack the ability to use unbiased judgment to cognitively contrive an understanding for something that may not be what they thought it was. Its just the unfortunate world we’ve become accustom to for generations. People believe in different individual truths all over the world; if you call one group “crazy,” then I can promise you that’s because you’ve never really gotten to know any of them to understand their reasons for believing what they do; even if its different than you and your beliefs.

I wonder about people far too much. So much that I ask myself every day, is it possible for people to change? Is it possible for me to change? Why are people wired the way they are? How can there be people that use their platform and influence on millions of other people to solely bash individuals who are simply exercising their god given constitutional right to object to injustice on the platform they were blessed to have? How are there people who can side with this behavior and think its okay? Not only that, but take vigilant rhetoric into their own hands and deflect their inner insecurities, bigotry, and hatred to the world they surround themselves in? How can people not see how big the world really is? It seems to never end; these questions. They seem to haunt me day and night as I encounter personalities that cause me to ponder on man’s true animalistic nature of the beast that dwells within.

Truth be told, countless hours of research, personal experiences, and interactions with so many different perspectives still can’t help offer me simple answers to the questions I’ve been asking myself since I was a child. Although I can tell you this, from what I observe daily, the direction we’re headed may be necessary but its not going to be easy. Matter of fact with everything the media projects into our individual consciousness, we seem to be at war with ourselves as well as each other more and more every single day. What I hope people come to realize is that its okay to let go and move on. But we can’t do that until we face the montage of unresolved conflicts that have been overlooked time and time again throughout the course of history. Its for that reason that I say someone telling an African-American to “get over slavery” is the same as someone telling the parent or even a friend of a sexual assault victim to “get over rape.” If you can’t seem to see how the two connect then it seems to me, that you don’t understand how empathy works.

People tend to forget that history, though long ago, still happened no matter how disconnected you are from it. Those millions of slaves that so many privileged, culturally absent people today try to pretend never existed had children. Those children had their grandchildren, and so on, and so on. Those great, great, great grandchildren are alive and well today. Do some research and study the breadcrumbs that lead back to slavery and you may understand why “these people can’t get over it,” as so many ignorantly state in continued conversations I’ve observed all throughout social media in recent months.

Slavery may have ended 143 years ago but the civil rights movement in America was only 48 years ago. I’ll put it to you like this, African-Americans couldn’t even vote only 4 years prior to my mother being born, and I’m still considered to be a young man. That should create an idea of how recent, institutionalized racism in this country was actually legal. Not only that but because of this, criminal acts of rape and murder were covered up by law enforcement in many states if not most of them.  Hell, if you look into our dark history as a whole, law enforcement at every level have been both directly and indirectly responsible for prevailing criminality on many occasions so its only “a wonder” that people don’t question authority and law enforcement agencies’ actions more often.  Its for these reasons these atrocities will never fade away. They’re embedded in our history and woven into the DNA of millions of people across this praised nation. Truth be told, if it wasn’t for Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, a large portion of the country would’ve been fine with African Americans never receiving the right to vote. I’m sure a nominal percentage of those people’s grandchildren still feel that way, to this day.

The point I’m trying to make is we live in an extremely unstable world full of misunderstandings and misguided pain. We have been for as long as recent history can even document. There are unknown realities, conspiracies, unrealized truths, evils, and orchestrated chaos that exist and have existed for reasons so many of us may never know.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be so ignorant and un-empathetic to injustice if we really take a brief moment to understand why and how such things that most of us feel shouldn’t happen, do happen. To understand is an agreement you make with yourself to fully grasp the reasons things happen and the reasons people react to them in different ways. While various people’s violent and aggressive behavior both on and offline may be disturbing to witness, it can also serve as a window into each other’s world and help us wonder how we can possibly co-exist knowing the injustices at exist in our shared history in order to progress as a civilization and species before its too late. I just hope it isn’t too late. I honestly don’t think it is. I wonder how many others feel the same.