Might I be able to one day kiss the ground I have trampled? Will the ground be on fire? The world is at ends with itself. The people are tarnished and the environment even more so. How can people be prouder of their basketball stars and influencers than their world leaders?
The question is not who our candidates might be leading, but what. What sentiments, what ideas, precedents, and traditions are they setting for generations? Malice, hatred, bitterness, selfishness, ego, and gain. Benevolence, gratitude, generosity, and peace. These fundamental ideas drive and birth generations, setting up a path to be followed by countless souls. And yet, we have people on a platform declaring their prowess, believing they are the best for a country in ruins representing who and not what, adding fuel to the fire.
We need water in a world that is on fire. Fire and water are the elements upon which humanity thrives. They are necessities that maintain a perfect harmony of life and have done so for eons. Water and fire keep us grounded. They kept our grandparents and their parents grounded and alive so that one day their children might live in the beautiful treasure trove called “America” and neglect them all together, bringing shame to the life they sustained for eons not so long ago.
What happened to our reverence of nature? What stops us now in our steps from diminishing our carbon footprint? Why do we choose to be harmfully relentless? Do we, as a nation, even know the scope of regret to come when all we know and all that has sustained us fails because we failed this earth? From fire and water come ashes and waves. While we may die as quickly as we have come and be washed away by the ocean’s waves, fire and water remain to be parents of our children. Our children, whose livelihoods are at stake everyday, forget the natural genealogy from which they stem. The pride of our heritage which we forget so easily. We are not only children to our human parents, born out of interpersonal love. But we are born out of a love, both natural and supernatural: choice, a time travel that sustains our past, nurtures our present, and brings hope to the future. And yet, too much heat has led to an imbalance as the teetering pot hums and sings of the impact of its all consuming fire. Water boils and overflows out of the open pot, angry and looking for an escape. This is the space we occupy in America. Our climates are endangered. Not just our physical environment, but our mental, moral, and political worlds; they are in rapid decline.
I am a student and a leader of my environmental group at my school. Each year, we take the same “initiative,” setting goals to recycle and reduce waste in ways that have never worked so far. It is not because positive change in our ways for the Earth is impossible. It is simply because we are losing hope. We are losing hope in the world because it seems that only fifteen students in a school of two thousand care enough to show up for a ten minute meeting every other Monday. We are losing hope because our parents don’t care. We are losing hope because our school doesn’t care. We are losing hope because our district, town, county, state, and country doesn’t care. We are losing hope because it seems to the undeniable majority of us that our government most certainly does not care. We are losing hope because we ourselves are starting to wonder if it would be better if we don’t care. With such a burden and a blame placed on aging younger generations to remedy. You may have heard of Greta Thunberg’s infamous speech, “Our House is On Fire.” We see the flames. We smell the smoke. We inhale the ash, and now the air that we breathe is tainted. We crave water for our parched throats, to rinse out our stinging eyes. First the kitchen. Then the bathroom. Then the bedrooms. How much more are we to lose before we, too, become nothing but dust?
We need water. We are thirsting for a drink so that we might clear our throats through the power, money, and fear that has silenced us; to yell “TAKE ME SERIOUSLY” at the top of our lungs. We need water to extinguish the fire. Our water is our consciousness, our awareness, and our hope. Our water is our time and our decisions. Our water is our choice and our vote.
Elections are a time for magic. Whoever said time travel was impossible was lying. As a child, I was occasionally asked the stupid question, “If you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?” I chose invisibility, wondering how cool it would be to disappear for a day and giggling to myself because it would never happen. Back then, I didn’t realize invisibility is entirely possible in our world and during election season. The choices we make as citizens in our country, whose value is often forgotten and mistaken by the false pretenses of people who hold themselves more sacred than democracy, are our form of time travel. Let me say that again. Your choices are your time travel. Your ballot is your superpower. With choice, we redeem the past. With choice, we live in the present. With choice, we shape the future.
Invisibility is known by a different term in my book: cowardice. Invisibility is for those who are nosy and want to spy but have no intention of acting on the information they gather. We desire to be seen but live our lives trying to blend in. It is natural for the fear of being valued to be overwhelming during such a season as this for those who have yet to understand what is at stake. But remember: you don’t have to be invisible when you can time travel.
Choice. Something we often take for granted; we don’t even realize we have it. And yet, only when it is stripped from our lives do we grit, shout, scream, and tear for choice. John Locke said that all men are born with certain “unalienable rights.” “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” With choice, all three are given a chance to change for better or for worse. We are in a land of opportunity, truly. Where my parents come from, society is rather restricted. Thinking freely, speaking freely, is frowned upon and uniformity is the status quo. America is different. But too many of us have been misusing our choice and our chance on being uniform to the clothes that have comforted us, hiding away in our own invisibility cloaks to protect ourselves from change without considering if the world might need it.
Guns, babies, justice, freedom, fire, water, choice. Now, I ask you once more: if you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?
