I was exactly like this. When I was young and got exposed
initially to the problems of the world, I suddenly felt the urge to do
something, to say something and to change something. I thought that I could. I
might be right but not in the grandeur of things. And most of the time, I reacted
without looking deeper at the issue. Or “overreacted” is the more appropriate
word. My emotions moved ahead of my logic. So I always ended up empty handed.
I see the same cycle happening a lot today. We
see people reacting. Overreacting.
Let’s take for example some people living in comfort for
most of their lives. When presented with something bad that they were never
exposed to before, they get shocked. For most of their lives, they
never thought these things happen. Then they become angry quickly. They might be
thinking that if they are able to avoid these things their whole life, there
might be an easy way to save those people who are already suffering. And
because some of these people are rich and influential, their voices are loud. They
become advocates and activists driven by intense passion calling for change of
what they had just discovered. The victims of these “bad things” are always desperate
to seek help from powerful people. They also want to end their hardships right
away. And once they hear about these powerful people speaking for their cause and who seemed can relate with their ordeals, they will see them as their “champion” and will start betting all their hopes and support for that person.
And then we see them together marching strongly, clamoring
for that change. Then calls for everyone to take notice and prioritize the change
they like to see, asking the whole world to turn upside
down for their cause while being driven by strong
emotions.
Seemed noble but it is a lot more dangerous. By drastic actions, the real problems are
not getting addressed. Most social issues we see are just effects of unnoticed deeper wounds. But since we’re only seeing and feeling
the pain in the outer, we always result into mere band-aid solutions. This is what happens when we fail to ask the simple question "why".
And one “why” is not enough to get into the root cause
and to find out the slow but real keys. Failure to ask “whys” result
into histrionic actions and big blank words which drown the real issues underneath. While
we’re scratching only the surface and looking for half-baked answers above,
it will never clean up the rotting garbage deep below.
But we’re human beings. We’re logical beings and emotional as well. I
read the Infinity Gauntlet Marvel Comic Book Series. One character in mind that
interests me a lot is Adam Warlock. He had once held one of the most powerful
items in the Marvel Universe, the Infinity Gauntlet. Once you get a hold of it,
you’ll have control of everything, time, space, soul, reality, mind, power.
They become god of the Marvel Universe. And the first thing that Adam Warlock
did when he get a hold of the gauntlet was to remove his perception of the “good
and bad” from his persona. He did it so he’ll be able to decide on things with pure logic
without an emotional bias. And so he did. Maybe, we should also not let our
perception of “good and bad” take over our emotions. We need to put logic in it.
And we might get surprised that the things we thought as good when we haven’t looked the big picture yet, is really the bad one.
