| SimpleGal |
Posted
on 06-Sep-03 09:40 AM
Here is a piece I wrote in high school almost 10 years ago at the brink of the 21st century. But times have remained the same to our disappointment. I felt like sharing it with my fellow sajhaites.
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As the 20th century draws to a close, eyes eagerly await to witness the wonders of tomorrow. Today, humanity has gone a long way in the path of development. As we glance behind our shoulders to marvel at our "achievements" we should have no qualms about taking pride in calling ourselves the most "civilized and intelligent" living creatures who have not only mastered the birds and the beasts, but altered the laws of nature, ventured out into space and done other things to make God wonder whether He really was the one to breathe life into us.
Times are definitely changing but one cannot be sure whether they are for the better or worse. In the past, nations smarted under the tyranny of absolute monarchs and dictators. Today the masses live in fear of being gunned down or blown up in their own homes by a bunch of pathological killers. As we advance to a more liberal and civilized society, it seems as though we are all the more vulnerable, yet enthusiastic about succumbing to our primitive instinct--savagery. In the days of yore, man was violent in order to survive, but today violence has metamorphosed into more sophisticated attributes---hatred, animosity, and indifference.
Let us now embark on a journey to the core of human nature. To begin with, let us examine a typical household ambience. Entering this place, within the walls of which its inhabitants live as a "family." But there looms in each relationship a selfish motive and each member is in constant pursuit of authority over the others. Every person, in the attempt to disparage the other's character and achievements for personal gratification and the fostering of his/her feelings of superiority, fails to see the other's wounds. Just as fire does not extinguish fire, each person becomes more enraged and eager for reprisal and thus he/she is blinded to the prospects of love and peace. The world is merely a macrocosm of this family.
Somebody once said that a happy family is but an earlier heaven. Little did the person know that today, try as one might, an ideal happy family is a rare find. Mother Teresa said that love beings at home, but where does one even begin to search for a "home"? People live in houses built of cold bricks which turn hearts into the North Pole and yet others live in tiny places called "apartments" that provide no space beyond their walls where the human mind can ponder over the values that sustain life or where they realize what has been amiss in their lives. They'd rather give the common man a headache, backache, and a "neckache" for simply trying to locate the floor where a friend resides in. One stands there completely mesmerized by the sheer height of the buildings or the architecture a house, but homes, the retreats after a hard day, something envisioned as a hallow ground where peace and harmony dwell, where every person share's the other's joy and sorrow and fortifies his/her heart with love and understanding so that hthe family remains intact through rough and bleak times---those homes are lost somewhere between dreams and reality.
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| SimpleGal |
Posted
on 06-Sep-03 09:59 AM
Let us exit from the household environment and think for a moment. The Creator who made us all gave us the same identity, that of Humanity. We chose to go different ways and adopt various lifestyles. We preferred to practice different religions and diversified our values, cutlures and traditions to govern our lives. Countless lives were lost only because we "differed" from each other and from the womb of the great divide, today was born.
Mankind lives with two brains inside his head, it seems though I am aware of the scientific limitations to this claim of mine. Nevertheless, I am boldly putting this forward as a possible philosophical argument. The two brains consist of one that propels him forward to progress and the other that drags him to ignorance and chaos. At times, he soars up to the moon while the other moment, he stoops down to a petty level turning into a vicious, callous and utterly despicable creature who embodies all the vice in the world. Apparently, an insane race with an unpredictable temperament is on the loose!
Now let us turn back the clock to the age of the dinosaurs. Among the various reasons surmised by paleontologists and scientists to explain their extinction was that they fought amongst themselves and brought about their annihilation. Rulers as they once were of the earth, hostility led to their ruin. Mankind, the so-called ruler of the earth today, is reverting to the blunders of these ancient creatures. It wouldn't be astounding if history chose to repeat itself, expecially since it went unnoticed the first time or ifthe world is merely in a frenzy of playing hide-and-seek with time.
Let's think about this simple phenomenon of nature before we leave, and learn from it. A garden has different flowers. Flowers with different colors, patterns, frangrances, textures and sizes; yet, they contribute together to enhance the beauty of the entire garden nd raidate it with vibrancy and life, thus offering a perfect example of coexistence. At the dusk of this century, we have these beautiful messengers of nature to look up to and hope that the dawn of the next millennium will bring wisdom to the world.
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