If I Could Change the World

"If I could reach the stars Pull one down for you, Shine it on my heart So you could see the truth."

Are you sitting comfortably? Well stand the fuck up.

Are you angry? No? Your mother's a fat c**t and if she's dead then she's a dead fat c**t. Blood boiling yet?

Now, for those of you insane enough to still be reading this, the inane, half-mad ramblings of a supposedly sexually frustrated, pint-sized Scotsman stuck in a dead-end job with absolutely no social standing whatsoever and the charisma of a baked potato to boot, someone whose opinions and philosophies should be taken with a very small grain of metaphorical salt; hopefully I can pry open those listless eyes of yours and blast 'em with my very own special brand of super happy sunshine rays and allow you to see things in a completely new light, or perhaps you'll just shrug and go back to playing Fallout 4 before masturbating furiously over yourself with cheesy Wotsit fingers, either way I don't care.

Now let us get to the heart of the issue or topic or whatever the fuck before I'm overcome by the sudden urge to go off on another vicious tirade: The world is shit. People are homeless, poor, hungry, being blown to bloody, sinewy pieces, jobs are scarce and the ones most of us are fortunate enough to find are so monotonous and low paying so as to make me want to impale my forehead with a giant wooden stake.

On top of that, the economy is crap and you need a black AmEx card it seems just to rent a pissy, dingy little shithole in Elephant & Castle but alas, life has always been this way and Grandma's a dirty lying bitch for saying otherwise.

"Oh, but I made an impassioned plea on Facebook/wrote a leftist article expressing my opinion on such matters." You may say in defense.

Whoop-dee-fucking-doo, what else did you do? Out there? In the physical world far removed from Snapchat, Facebook and Kanye West?

So you brought to my attention that some people have it worse off than others, why thank you for your wisdom, my name's Rip Van Winkle and bright lights frighten me.

We know what the issues are and for those of you who were blissfully unaware please run a bath, get in and drop your laptop/toaster/radio in too, trust me, it'll be the most productive thing you do all year.

Let us shift the focus not onto what's wrong with the world, but onto how things got so messed up in the first place and the steps we can take towards real and lasting change.

In my own life I see kids convinced they need to act tough and peddle drugs to survive and get by, middle aged men and women giving themselves ulcers over bills and feeding their families and bright young things dashing manically from one fad to the next with a glazed lost look in their eyes and the vague notion that they want to do something someday with their lives, that is if they ever figure out what that something is...

The questions we need to be asking are why has our current system allowed so many to fall by the wayside and slip through the cracks? Have they been blindsided by the pressures of life? Do people become trapped in vulnerable positions where each day is a struggle to make ends meet because they have been ill prepared to deal with the unrelenting shitstorm that is life? Is this due to some fundamental flaw in our education system? The structure of the modern workplace?

We will come back and analyse these questions in greater detail some other time, as for now it seems we have become complacent, adhering to an "At least it's not me."

"It could be worse." mindset, we're all shambling, drooling, idiotic zombies, intensely focused on our own well being and on living inside our idealistic little bubbles which protect us from some of the harsher truths of reality.

What we need is a revolution in our way of thinking, we must do a complete U-turn on our habit of looking out for number one; useful from an evolutionary, survivalist point of view but quite unnecessary in the modern age; and instead ask not "What can I do with MY life?" but "What can WE DO with society as a whole?"

"But Henry." You cry.

"I must eat and pay for Netflix too! You can't expect me to drop everything and run off to the Amazon to save the rainforest whilst drop-kicking ISIS and eradicating world hunger!"

No, I don't, but we can all start small in order to better equip our future children, the next generation, with the tools required to forge new habits and traditions that can be used to elicit the changes we want to see in the world, we can start by simply becoming more compassionate, thoughtful beings who take it upon ourselves to improve not only our own living conditions but also those of the people around us.

From past experience I can tell you that funding a homeless drive to distribute food, water and sleeping bags to around 20-30 of the most vulnerable on London's streets costs around roughly £250, you buy Stone Island jumpers for £300 so shut the fuck up, get some mates together, get your arses down to Costco and start making those little changes in the world that will someday lead to a lot.

Peace and happiness.

Henry