Reflecting+on+what+we+are+doing+about+it

Reflecting on what we are doing about it:

I am worried that my generation is a generation of apathetic witnesses to oppression. We have inherited a multitude of problems, yet I don't see us making efforts to fix these problems. Instead, we put our energy toward complaining about our ill fortune. Our first priorites are our own problems, and we choose to ignore the more detrimental problems affecting those surrounding us. There are times when we are as careless as Tom and Daisy, and we expect others to clean up our messes. There are times when we are as greedy as the people John Steinbeck writes about; we become consumed with the bulk of our possessions as a means of determining our wealth. As Tom Hayden explains in the Port Huron Statement, we have lost our hope, and replaced our capacity for hope with cynical doubt. I feel that my generation is so overwhelmed with the problems we have inherited, that we felt defeated before we gave ourselves a chance to work for any radical change. This sense of defeat has led us to fear revolutions, as Alexis de Tocqueville puts it, even though these revolutions seem to be all that will lift us out of the condition of the country we have inherited. I am worried that if we keep this cynical, defeated, and egocentric attitude, we will never find it in ourselves to resolve the problems that we were not only born into, but are contributing to as well.

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