Snowball

First, a confession. If one were to be following what I have been writing here, there might be an impression that I am one bitter and sorry person who wallows in the deepest of self pity. Well, actually, that's sort of far from the truth---I'm not really a bitter and sorry person who wallows in self pity. Like many things in life, all is not as it seems. This blog is really designed for rants and other social observations that I care to share with the world (where you may be from), so naturally there is a certain element of self-selection in what gets to be displayed and demonstrated here. Obviously then, given my subject matter, things will appear to be rather cynical and pessimistic, more so that who I am in real life. So the confession here is that I am not as cynical and bitter as what the contents here might lead on.

Second, a revelation. While I'm not that cynical nor that bitter, I am still rather aloof about the world as a whole. The strangeness of this statement ought to strike the reader by now, particularly if said reader is one who knows me from real life before stumbling upon this little space of mine that I have carved out of the Internet. I see the world as it is---material, harsh, with everyone just a small part of a larger ecosystem. But by no means am I unwilling to engage with people---that's where the strangeness comes in. Somehow along the way I find that making acquaintances among some groups of people are very easy, while of course there is still that sizable group that I can offend in the just the same amount of ease. But the main point is that I probably have some form of an engaging personality that this blog might not demonstrate, so kindly temper expectations a little.

Thirdly, a premonition. The future is always uncertain---no one truly knows what is going to happen in the near future, let alone those that are still distant from us. Anyone claiming otherwise is either lying through their teeth or are just plain lucky in guessing. With that in mind, the impermanence of things will become a large issue for my generation in time to come. Now, more than ever, we find that the material world and the abstract world are colliding in ways that were unforeseen by the elder generation, and we also find that the attitudes towards entities of this generation have laragely changed from the past. Impermanence and the illusion of privacy are going to be the norm in time to come if they haven't been so now, and we will find that whatever memories that we have about anything will undergo revision over time on a larger scale, making the concepts of truth and falsehood under history a harder case to determine. The data explosion has, on the one hand, made some people less ignorant, yet on the other hand its deluge buries the simple minds of the vast majority. Knowledge is power, but a little knowledge is the most dangerous thing of all. The sad thing is that many in my generation do not possess the in-depth knowledge necessary for sound decision making---they are sated from the vast breadth of little knowledge that they scrimp from the multitude of sources whose veracity are not easily determined. We live in dangerous times indeed.

Lastly, an emancipation. There is hope yet for us all. Now, more than ever, we must engage intelligently with the decision process, for it is only through active engagement that we can get our views, perspectives and lines of thought heard. But to engage is not to enter with a destructive mindset---the engagement is an action of showing awareness and proof that we as a generation are maturing to become the worthy successors of the world. No longer can we hide behind the comforts of our homes to await the fates that others have prescribed for us---we need to take charge of our own future. The biggest enemy of this century is not the extremists nor the terrorists---it is the blatant lack of education, the inability to dissect and synthesize as much of the facts of the issue as possible, the inability for us to make our own decisions and to stand by them as long as we have a justifiable cause in the context of a greater good, or at the very least, in a context where it is publicly defensible. Our only salvation from a world towards doom is awareness that it is occurring, and through that awareness, the public-spiritedness that governs the societies will emerge through the courage of its citizens to voice out their beliefs and to support what is right, and not what is rich.

So, is this a call for revolt? No. It is a call for the technologically savvy to realise that the virtual world that they live in is only present because the material world permits it. Lose one's footing in the real world, one will lose his/her footing in the virtual one as well. Do what is right---do what needs to be done.