5000 Things to Do Before We Die

Do you ever feel like there are so many problems to tackle, and can't find a way to go about solving them? Or worse, that it's beyond hope and what's the point anyway?

We've got it all wrong, and I want to change things.

But I haven't a clue as to how to engage in something really meaningful. I'm talking about our environmental problems, combating global warming, developing a workable social security and nationalized healthcare of some sort, ending this insane war we're engaged in, making corporations develop environmentally sustainable practices, sending aid to the Developing World and ensuring that it makes it to the people and social entities that truly need it, legitimizing this so-called democracy we have in place. The list goes on.

You know, I often wonder how we - myself, my community, the countless generations that have preceded mine - let it come to this. How is it that we haven't been able to keep the engine of corporate capitalism and globalization in better check, through the writing of tight, implementable legislation? Why haven't we held our politicians to higher standards? Why haven't we fought for more diversified and uncensored media? Again the list goes on.

I don't see how this country that is always looking for bigger, better, more, could not have, at some point along the way, closely observed the operations of other nations and then pieced together a nation comprised of the best bits? That's obviously a very simplified suggestion, but the point is that we ought to be able to identify successes of other industrialized nations - think Sweden, France, etc. - and find a way to may them workable for us. Are 'we' really so proud and complacent that we can't admit that we haven't all the answers?

See, once I get thinking about all the ways in which we are going wrong, it's hard to break free. It becomes such a weight. And while I understand that I, as an individual, can do little if anything to change the course of history, I do know that social movements and uprisings of the sort that we very obviously need, require a start somewhere. With one person. And then another. And so it goes.

Where is the momentum we so desperately need? And how is it possible to prioritize such impossibly huge and all-encompassing issues? Is it more important to concentrate on education or environmental sustainability or equal pay for women in the workplace or fair treatment of gays or media conglomerates or economic development of Third World countries, or the genocide in Darfur? How can we say?

There are so many things requiring our attention its so easy to become paralyzed and do what we've long been doing: Nothing