This spinning thing we live on called Earth is only becoming more and more of an unpredictable powder keg of chaos, ridiculousness, and all manner of things crazy, dark and outright insane.
Don’t believe me? Go watch any 6:00 news on any television network, or spend one hour on Facebook to see the kind of stuff that people are posting, sharing and commenting on.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
*readers return with color drained from faces*
I know, right?
One day, the world is a bright and happy place where you see the true good that can happen. Then it seems like in the blink of an eye, it turns into a horrible place where you fail to see the humanity in your fellow man.
It can be a lot to process, and when I’m not shaking my head at the craziness that society is capable of showing us in 2017, I’m thinking of where we might be headed as a human race if some things continue the way they are.
It kind of makes me dream of a better world. Maybe that’s the key; disappearing inside your own head and just imagining the world as you would shape it, like you were playing some game and you could decide where all the pieces (humans) go. As if you were the Master of the Universe, perhaps.
What kind of world do I dream of? Well…
I dream of a world where people put others before technology. I don’t know how people can walk in a straight line and keep their eyes glued to their phone screens without stepping out into oncoming traffic; I can’t even pat my stomach and rub the top of my head at the same time. My friends and I re-inforce a soft rule we have whenever we get together where we all put our phones in the middle of the table, and the first one who grabs their phone pays the tab at the end of the night. So far, we’ve all had to pay our own way.
I dream of a world where people actually live in the moment instead of making sure to capture it. There’s a photo floating around the internet that makes this point perfectly. It’s a sea of people at some big event, and *everyone* has their phones and cameras out. But standing against the railing and just watching the event unfold is an older woman, content to just watch things happen in front of her and then move on with her life. While everyone around her is busy turning their cameras on or making sure to get the right angle or frame, she’s the only one truly experiencing the moment instead of recording it to watch later. Life happens fast, and while some people are busy documenting every second of it, others prefer to just experience it.
I dream of a world where late night talk shows find more material than Donald Trump. Hey, I get it; the guy can be a walking joke set-up with the words that come out of his or his press secretary’s mouth. But you live in America, so surely there are a thousand things that happen every day that the writers of Colbert, Fallon or Kimmel can touch on? But, then again…
I dream of a world where the American President is, well, a better American President. Perhaps I’ve said enough on that.
I dream of a world where people don’t feel like as if World War 3 could break out any day. Dropping missiles, dropping bombs, North Korea with their finger on the button, it’s enough to produce some new grey hairs on my head.
I dream of a world where child predators aren’t from the Outlook or surrounding regional area. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen two of those Facebook videos where people went and confronted potential child predators, with one man with connections to Outlook and the other allegedly the owner of a café in Beechy. You hope that the people you may know don’t have dark, harmful secrets like that, but if this job has taught me anything in the last ten years, it’s that the image of the picturesque small town where “everybody knows everybody” and you can keep your doors unlocked just doesn’t apply anymore.
I dream of a world where people still send each other letters. Remember letters? The things where you wrote on a sheet of paper, folded it, stuck it in an envelope, had to lick that glue, and sealed it up before buying a stamp for it? I know they have to still exist, but they’re about as elusive as Bigfoot or the future Mrs. Ruttle.
I dream of a world where I don’t have to dream of a better world. But life in this day and age seems to be making that almost impossible, isn’t it?
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
