Sometimes I wonder, at what point exactly do people really start feeling concerned about the future we’re building for the coming generation? At what point do we sit back and realize that we’re getting it all wrong, and if we’re not careful, we’ll mess things up, and the future generations will pay the ultimate price? Because for many of us, as long as we’re not seeing the repercussions today, then we’re not really bothered about it.
But then, that’s not the way life should be. We literally do everything, thinking only of the present. Our comfort today, our ease today. And we choose to let the future take care of itself. However, we seem to forget that with every careless act we do, the future only gets worse.
I took a trip on Saturday, a pretty long one. And during the journey, I passed a canal. Really dirty stuff and filled with trash. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the people who live in that area. For long after I left there, the stench of the canal was still in my nose. And then, I wondered about the people who live there and have made it a part of their daily life. It’s crazy!
But you see, the canal didn’t get to that state overnight. It started with one person throwing their trash there, or throwing their used bottle. It doesn’t matter if this was five years ago or ten years ago. It started with someone who didn’t want to bother about disposing of their trash properly, and it snowballed into the eyesore that it is today.
The people who started dumping refuse there, many of them probably didn’t suffer the consequences. It’ll be new people who moved there, kids born into the area, landlords and landladies who own their properties and thus can’t move. They’re the ones who suffer this. The truth is that when something is bad, it doesn’t matter if the effect is immediate or not, we should see it as simply being bad.
If you throw a rusted nail on the floor and someone steps on it almost immediately, you’ll feel bad about it. What you did was bad, but will it still be so bad if the person stepped on it six months later, when you’ve moved on from the act? What about fifty years from now? Somehow, the nail is still there, and someone steps on it. Does the long passage of time reduce your role in the person’s injury?
It doesn’t. This is why we should always consider the future when we do things, because while we’re trying to make our lives better, we should remember that the coming generation is relying heavily on us to pass on something beneficial to them.
And this goes for everything we choose to get involved in: choosing our leaders, our religion, our careers, and the choices that affect our families. What will this choice look like ten years from now? Twenty years from now? Because the time to actually build the future is now!
