It’s Friday night, and I’ve been feeling a little lazy for the last several hours. Unmotivated and low energy… how about I talk about something lighthearted and easy tonight?

The Topic: How Do We Fix the World?

So.

The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that a problem exists in the first place. The world is broken in some fundamental ways. How do we fix it?

What are some of the symptoms?

1. It’s extremely difficult for young people to get jobs that will sustain them.
2. It’s harder than it has ever been to buy homes, because it’s just so expensive. If people can’t buy homes, they can’t secure wealth, which means we’ll have an entire generation beholden to the previous, which is not sustainable.
3. We value money more than we value human life.
4. We have the means to feed, house, and educate everyone, but we don’t because of the previous point.
5. We have the greatest wealth gap we’ve ever had.
6. We have the greatest communication network we’ve ever had in history, giving access to the wealth of human knowledge and invention, yet we have a loud and motivated minority spreading anti-intellectualism and spawning things like anti-vaccination movements.
7. Racism, bigotry, ableism… all of the inequality that is still baked firmly into the infrastructure of our society.
8. The frailty of our political system. There’s a LOT more I can say on this subject, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

These are a handful of symptoms right off the top of my head. There is so much more. Goodness gracious. If you have a favorite flaw I failed to include in this list, let me know and maybe I’ll edit this and extend it.

So what do we do about it?

Individually? Almost nothing. We have to be the best versions of ourselves. We have to value people over substance. We have to lift each other up instead of tear each other down. We need to look at complicated issues with nuance and thought, rather than reduce it to bad/good.

Protest? Vote? Don’t vote? What does a person do?

It’s easy to get disillusioned with voting when there is gerrymandering, two-parties, and electoral colleges. The fascist party is unified behind their villain, even while he’s in court (poorly) defending himself for libeling his rape victim. The other party is feckless and mostly in support of their geriatric incumbent that was known for gaffes as a young man.

I think Biden is a good man. I also look at him and feel like it’s very difficult to ignore his age.

That’s enough on that subject from me tonight. I’m trying to succinctly state facts and be honest. We’re trying to fix the world, not alienate everyone.

I don’t have an answer for the political problems. I’m not sure I have an answer for the capitalist problems, either. We’re cool with pooling our resources to pay for police and firefighters. Police in some places are buying armored personnel carriers, body armor, and weapons of war, while firefighters can often be found once a year on the street, passing the boot in order to raise funds. Maybe we haven’t solved that problem, after all.

A lot of the solutions to some of our capitalism problems wind up looking like socialism. It’s very difficult to privatize socialism without being someone as wealthy as Elon Musk, but to get as rich as someone like Elon Musk, you have to value money more than people. It’s not going to happen.

That leads back to politics, and there are too many people that get in a twist over trivial matters at a football game. No kneeling. No Taylor Swift. The priorities of some of our population do not appear to be in alignment with the Christian values they proclaim to support.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old and my perspective is skewing towards pessimism with age, but I don’t see how we untangle this knot. The 2020s have shown me a side of humanity I thought was much, much smaller. Problems I thought we, as a society, had fairly well solved are not solved at all.

So how do we fix the world?

There must be an answer.