Sometimes I read the news and sit immobile, grappling with the incongruence of my world to the world I’m reading about.
But the world I read about is shooting more children every year, selling more guns every day and getting more violent every second. It’s exploiting more of the impoverished for smaller price tags and it’s charging more to teach people things every term.
They say that people who worry incessantly tend to be more intelligent, but my constant fretting makes me feel more like a hopeless, idealistic idiot than a genius. Because it seems the only things people are passionate about any more are the things they hate. Every day I see another hateful message, another obnoxious thing spouted by another ignorant politician/person who thinks that their words are more worth listening to than the cries of those dying in Syria.
I worry because the world thinks it’s more important to hate LGBT people than those who are making slaves out of human beings right now. Yes, it’s out of sight, obscured by pop music and daytime television, but it should never be so out of mind as it is now.
I worry because people are bombing abortion clinics where pregnant women are sitting, waiting for an appointment. I worry because we fight injustice with more injustice, putting people with too many parking tickets in cages.
War on teenagers
I worry because the war on drugs is becoming the war on teenagers. I worry because sometimes I don’t feel safe in my own town. I worry because when women voice the injustices heaped against them, the only reply by men seems to be petulant whining. I worry because the world is broken and no one is trying to fix it.
Is it a little much to say I have a dream? I have a stupid, hopeless, idealistic dream that one day my children will live in a world where they will not be judged by their music taste, but by their awareness of the world around them. I have a dream that one day the human race will stop languishing in ignorance and realise the first step towards solving a problem is admitting there is one. I have a dream that one day I will walk the streets of my home town without fear, that my gender will not dictate my job prospects or my salary.
I have a dream that the colour of my hair will no longer decide whether you think it’s safe to let your children wave at me. I have a dream that one day we will realise history is not just a collection of boring facts, but a guide to the future.
I have a dream that one day we will read our charter of human rights and accept that the fact children are starving in the world is not simply a way to make our children eat their carrots, but a crisis that we must solve.
One day I hope that the child I see being wheeled around in supermarkets will be equally important and equally loved as every other child in the world.
This world needs to be fixed, and if The Lego Movie has taught us anything, it is that a child can lead a revolution. We must raise our children to be revolutionaries. We must teach them that social injustice should not be a permanent fixture, but a temporary problem. We must teach them everyone is loved and deserves to be loved, regardless of their sexual orientation.
We must teach ourselves once more that religion is beautiful because it inspires us to do good. It does not entitle us to hate what we do not understand; it must teach us to love even the things that we cannot understand.
We’re one human race that sits on a history of hate, moved by violent impulses many of us cannot resist, and one day that hate will find a way to burn us all – unless, we can teach our children how to rebuild when the storm has passed.
Emma Tobin is 17 and lives in Newbridge, Co Kildare with her parents and younger brother. She blogs at www.writing.ie