It’s the end of the world as we know it….

… and I feel fine?

Seriously, I stopped watching the news a while ago. It helps that I don’t have cable. So where does this leave me in the grand scheme of things? Current events are, by the time they reach me, old news. Is the world suffering from the fact that I’m completely disconnected from all reality that does not immediately intersect my own? Nope.

Why?

Because if I made a conscious effort to make the world, on a large scale, a better place… I would probably fail. Oh, I’d probably do some good. Individuals might very well benefit from my attempting to improve the quality of life for all humanity. But would humanity itself notice? I doubt it.

One individual trying to fix the world is like… well… I’m trying to find an appropriate metaphor here.

It’s like trying to move a mountain with a spoon.

It’s like trying to drink an ocean.

It’s like trying to build a life-size replica of the world with freakin toothpicks.

But you see… none of those metaphors actually do the original concept justice. I can imagine someone, devoting their entire life to the task, relocating a large chunk of a mountain with a spoon. I can imagine someone with enough free time drinking enough water to take a large chunk out of a major body of water. I can imagine someone in a space-suit with a ton of glue and toothpicks building a big round ball. The tasks themselves are, honestly, completely impossible for one person. But I can visualize someone attempting these acts.

Because the end result is a static goal. You’re moving a mountain. It’s going from point A to point B. You’re drinking an ocean, again, point A to Point B. (Point B being… your bladder? Hmmm. That would hurt). You’re building a big ball out of toothpicks.

But one person can not change the world. Unlike the metaphors above, the world continues to change while you attempt to change it. You fix something, other stuff breaks. You build something, other things fall apart. You can make improvements, absolutely, but you can not fix the whole of the thing while the sum of it’s parts are in contstant fluctuation.

So what does it take? Everyone. That’s fairly obvious.

But the problem with everyone working on it is that they don’t have time to actually work on it. How are you expected to fix something in Abu Dhabi when your next door neighbor beats on his wife? When your kids are failing in school. When your car broke down. Or you lost your job. Or any number of other things that, while they are small in the grand scheme of things to the world, are huge in the small scheme of things that is YOUR world.

People are too busy living their lives to worry about other peoples lives. Most of, if not all of, our energy is devoted from getting from one day to the next. Keep your house clean. Do your job. Raise your children properly. Most people live from paycheck to paycheck. How can you expect someone to fix other peoples problems when their problems are jumping up and down in front of them, screaming gibberish and nonsense and beating them with a metaphorical Nerf baseball bat.

So who has to fix the world?

Our governments do the governmental equivalent of what we do with our lives. They run our countries. They do what they can, but there isn’t an individual economy in the world that can sustain all of us. Not the way things are run. And government are made up of people who, to be perfectly honest, are trying to live their lives day-to-day and get to the weekend. They need to clean their houses, do their jobs and raise their children properly, etc.

So what’s the solution? Change our forms of government? Hey… how about communism? Oh yeah, that’s right, communism is like… well… it’s like this:

There is a bushel of bananas in a tree. There is a community of monkeys living around that tree. The bushel of bananas is large enough to feed the entire community. All the monkeys need to do is get along with each other and share properly.

15 seconds after the bushel of bananas is discovered, monkeys are rampaging around, gnawing on  each other and hurling feces around. Why did this happen? Because monkeys are stupid.

Communism will never work because people don’t work well enough together for it to happen properly. If people worked well together, it wouldn’t matter what form of government we used. We could chose our leaders by comparing earlobes. People would work together and they’d make it work.

Anyway, I forget what I was talking about. I vaguely remember monkeys, so I must be doing something right.

The end result of my giant complaint is this:

A giant portion of humanity needs to simultaneously begin to work towards the greater goal of making our world a better place on a large scale. This is the only way things will improve significantly. We are, in all likelihood, witnessing the slow but steady decline of our species.

I can’t walk out my door today and make the world a better place. That makes me a little sad. But I’m too busy cleaning my house (which I’ve neglected by doing this), working my job and raising my cats properly to really focus on it. So I don’t have enough free time to truly dwell on things, therefore, I’ll file these feelings in the back of my mind and eventually be… if not OK… then reasonably accepting of the situation.

Now I’m going to go read a comic book. Why, you ask? Is it because comic books present scenarios where individuals can make the world better on a large scale? Is it to escape from my elusive feelings of discontentment regarding our fate in the universe? Escapism, perhaps?

Nope.

It’s because comic books have hard-bodied chicks in skin-tight outfits, and some pretty cool fights.