User:Sleepless Emperor
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I once saw a little girl, she couldn't have been more than three or four years old, playing "Virtual Hunter II: Just Like The Real Kill". Her father was holding her up so she could wrap her tiny fingers around that huge, green, dirty plastic shotgun (which was slightly bigger than her entire torso), and she was laughing ecstatically while she took potshots at deers and ducks.
They tell me this is our future, but I say it does not have to be! Man makes his own destiny; it is never too late to change ourselves and the world around us. But if we keep denying the problems of our world, if we hide behind our apathy and our dual puerile fantasies of invincibility and insularity, if we continue to obstinately sit with eyes shut, allowing our senses to be lulled to sleep by propaganda and the petty promises of portly politicians, and pretend that our detached mediocrity will defend us from the veritable horde of our own inadequacies as a society and as individuals, then everything humanity has worked for and accomplished shall be lost, degraded to irreverent violence and green plastic.
These are the times of dawn and dusk: thankless days where our laws, society, and all we know and hold dear are on the threshold of ruin. Men of mediocrity shrink back from the coming storm, succumb to the fear and emptiness forced down all of our throats and poured into every orifice of our bodies, and take comfort in the fetid security of complacency. But those who refuse to bend, who rage against what they know to be wrong and recognize that we all must progress or perish, truly hold the future in their hands. Cruelty, oppression, and hatred are never overcome effortlessly, but nothing worth fighting for is ever gained with ease. It is our right as individuals to go forth into this world and grind all those who use fear as a weapon and who wish to strip us of our rights as equal human beings into dust. We are either a world of righteousness, or we are nothing at all; humanity has the ability to truly do great things once we realize our own selves and our capacity to do good.
"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better."
-- Ray Bradbury
The future is at stake at this very instant, and every day draws us with binding chains nearer to the time when we must decide whether our children and grandchildren shall be born into a land where they can think, act, and feel freely, or into an existence of slavery and solitude. We cannot lie down, we cannot forget what is at stake, and we must remember that, once the smoke of battle has cleared, it is always "better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
