Command-C. Command-V. A “new” idea is born.
When did creativity get replaced by copy-pasting? It’s not just students peeking over their classmate's shoulders anymore; we’ve got a creativity crisis on our hands. Disney movies are live-action remakes of old animations. Popular music is the same four chords played in different keys and with different beats. Video games are remastered. Facebook posts are shared thousands and thousands of times over again. Yet nothing changes, because people have gotten far too comfortable with the reassuring familiarity of these repeated themes.
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The reason we aren’t seeing any fundamental change in the judgmental, cold nature of society is because we keep regenerating "updated" versions of the same people, the same ideas, and thus, the same actions. Take the 1970's. There’s a Green Revolution alongside Civil Rights and antiwar movements that will go down in history. It’s a decade of massive societal change, an eye-opener for the U.S. that forces it to take a step back and re-pave some roads. The country is never the same again...but isn’t it? Fast-forward forty years and what do we see? Protests and riots over discrimination, equality, climate change, and so much more; all that was apparently resolved when our parents were kids.
You can easily argue that hey, we don’t have segregated schools or buses or workplaces anymore. There isn’t a whites-only bathroom at the baseball stadium and in your favorite restaurant. Change was made back then. Yet, there's a sign that says Women’s room, and if you dare place even just a transgender toe over that doorway, you better be ready for a full-blown media attack and a plateful of lawsuits. Mass incarceration rates of minority groups are skyrocketing, with a policing system that's not only policing the public, but also its own, for officers are committing crimes nearly as much as the general public. We're still at war, we still use fossil fuels, we're still overweight, we still don't trust our neighbors and we've still got a million other things to fight over.
I'm all for raising awareness about these problems; that’s the first step. However, the cyclical nature of generational judgement has pushed it round again, and something has to change about how we fix it this time or we'll be right back here in 2050.
We need to find a way to resist this “command-v” mentality for a while. Toss aside recycled ideas, no matter if they look different from before. More than that, we need start making our own opinions on the world and stop letting past generations tell us the way things are or should be. We have to stop trusting that everything that mainstream media published is completely accurate. We need to start fresh, from the ground up, but without forgetting what the past has taught us. Only then will we have a chance at ridding this world of this constant two-sided opposition by typing out our own stories .
