The world is me

Yesterday I saw something I didn't think possible, especially in our society's current state of degradation. I saw a man, with a dog, picking up off the ground the dog's poop in a small bag.

Wait, what? A man actually doing what should be considered normal, but what actually is considered the rarest of rarities in this society? Someone actually doing the right thing, not just talking about it? Wow, no way!

I was walking down the street when I saw him. I passed him and then I realized. I walked backwards for a couple of meters, and watched him pick up the poop in a bag, because I truly couldn't believe my eyes. I felt a sense of gratitude... a sense of care for the man that I didn't know, but who proved that, as I stated in a previous post, there still is hope for us. There still is a chance that the world is slowly changing for the better, that sometime, maybe not for a couple of decades, maybe not even for centuries, but sometime in the future, all the ideas and values that some have given their lives for will be obeyed, unforcefully respected and priced as they ought to be.

That thought alone warms my soul.

You see, I think that most of the man is created and influenced by his environment. I consider that, no matter the core of man, no matter the traits that are said to be passed on, generation after generation, by genes, one is shaped by the world he grows up in, the world he lives in, the world he dies in.
Society creates us, but we are the ones who create society. Society is me, and society is you. A crum makes the bread and without it, that bread is never the same.
People change us, people teach us, people (and places, but mostly it's the people) make us who we are, but we, in turn, teach and change others, who will do that to others, and so on and so forth. So, it's all a cycle, a cycle in which some ideas are lost, some are modified, just like in a game we used to play in school. It was called "Telefonul fara fir" in Romanian, that would be "wireless telephone", right :))? Someone would start by whispering something to the next player, and he would whisper to the next, and so on. The point was to see how much information accurately reached the end of the line. We had tons of fun with it, but it proved that almost every time, information is changed by the bearer.

This can be extrapolated, leading to the idea that one adds his own thoughts, his own identity to the message he bears, to the teachings he's learned, to all that he interacts with.

Society will only change with the change of the people who make it.
The base is that people are the society, their personalities define it, their laws govern it. Changes in mentality are the means by which the world evolves, and regresses. It all starts in your mind. You, and only you, are capable of telling good from evil, because good and evil are relative concepts. Good and evil can be restricted to some extent, to create some basic ideas that everyone accepts, but the little things, the ones that truly matter, are detailed in each of our minds.

We all owe it to ourselves, and to the ones who have tried to make us better people, to think alone, to judge by ourselves what is good and what is bad, to question everything around us, and not to take anything for granted. "Why?" is the basic question that leads to progress, progress of mind, thus of society, and thus of the entire world. I refuse to be told what to do, and often react quite nervously even to people whom I wouldn't want to hurt, because I feel that one's liberty of thought and one's freedom of speech constitute one of the forms of freedom, the most important and most sought after type of freedom - one of the types of freedom that is essential to one's existence and without which none can live.

You cannot say that you are alive if you do not think by yourself, if you are not the one who pulls the strings in the puppet show you call "life". The easiest way to tell if someone is intellectually asleep, or worse, dead, is to ask the fundamental question: "Why?". "Why do you think that way?", "Why is that which you claim true?"..."Why?". Some can still be awoken from this lifeless dormitation that plagues life.

I told you earlier that the prospect of the world changing, although kind of distant and uncertain, warms my soul. It should warm yours, too...