We are told since we are children that as a society we are meant to work and come together to help towards one productive community to help the whole world thrive. Though this is true, I feel that recently that there is a huge discrepancy in the people who are willing to step outside of the accepted social norms, and present themselves as an individual and maybe break themselves from these preconceived ideals.
Lately I have come to notice of my peers that, none of them are really able to put forth ideas that are truly their own. There seems to be an accepted social norm that is going around in the world and with the way that my generation is looking to shape up, there may be little to nothing that will ever happen in the future to change that. My generation is coming from heavily regulated public school systems, churches that indoctrinate children from a young age, and from an age of websites like Myspace and Facebook, that all work to strip away the kind of individualism that someone should really be trying to figure out at a young age. I am not trying to put forth the idea that the government or some higher society is trying to control my generation, instead I think that it’s the neediness of my generation that is the main proponent of the lax attitude of most of the generation. When the most prominent figures in our society today are the athletes, pop stars, movie stars, and other kinds of celebrity it’s hard to remember that intellectuals are the ones who are really making the world move, and I think that it’s a shame that a majority of people are probably losing this fact.
The upcoming generation is losing that sense of individualism and personal drive, and it is apparent in the way that people are going through school and their daily lives. There is always some sort of religious group or political faction out on campus trying to get people to join them for their cause. One day I actually went up to one of these people and asked them why it was that they were trying to recruit people for their cause. I got just what I expected in their answer, It was just them regurgitating the same campaign mottos and slogans that you can hear from the candidate themselves, it was almost as if they had joined the cause just because they wanted to join, not because they were critical of the issues that the candidate was trying to represent, but because they had been told that these are the issues that are important and this was the candidate that they had clung close to. I then continued to ask a few other people trying to spread their represented agenda to the campus, and none of them ever gave me a personal reason as to why they wanted to support their cause, all of it seemed to be something I could hear from any other Christian, Republican, Democrat, or Muslim. The sad reality is that I doubt any of them had really taken time to reflect why they’d chosen to become a part of that group but had merely just chosen to participate based on some social standardization that they come from.
It has also become apparent to me that, most of the values and moral codes that people are so quick to adhere to aren’t always what a person truly values. It is more like they just conform to the accepted social conscious that society has predetermined for us. The sad thing is that, within these moral concepts that are pushed upon us, there is a lot of hypocrisy in them. When we tell people that killing is wrong, yet glorify the notion of supporting our troops and the war, what kind of message are we really sending out to people? That it is not okay to kill the person who is personally driving you insane on your day to day basis, but as long as the person who you are willing to kill is from another country and supposedly stands against every value and personal perception you have then you can off their head without a second thought. Then there’s the personal favorite one that I have of the ideal of marriage being some kind of sacred practice that is ordained and glorified from God. When it comes to the point that the government is controlling who can get married, how they can get married, and to whom they can get married, it seems that God is nowhere to be found in the equation. Though as a group we have come to the evaluation that marriage should be something that should be held sacred and helps the community as a whole, when it’s really the exact opposite, seeing as someone who is single would have more disposable income to put into the economy, but what’s common sense to the individual when all of society knows what is best for your life.
The world at whole really needs to reevaluate what kind of an individual that most people are. I’m a huge proponent of individualism and I think the world needs more people who are willing to go outside of the norms and accepted structures, and reform the way people think about why they do choose to follow instead of leading in their own lives. I hope that sometime in my life, there will be some kind of social and political revolution that takes place, which shakes the foundation of most of our ideals, and causes the world to challenge and correct itself. Though maybe I am just a crazy person because I choose to set my moral and values away from society, but I’ve always found it weird that when it comes down to people’s conscious decisions, their personal conscious always goes with what society has set forth as the good that people should be doing.
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