It's funny where and when good thoughts strike you. The following one I had in a car as I was riding out to breakfast one morning. Thankfully, I wasn't driving. So I pulled out a little notepad and jotted down the gist of it as best I could:

It strikes me that one of the failings of today's youth is that they have a great deal of potential, but they do nothing useful with it. At the same time, I do not accuse them with saying that it is a problem that they should or must fix. The way I see it, youth accurately sees the problems in the world and is promptly overwhelmed. And rightly so. The nature and complexity of the problems confronting the world are so varied and intertwined that there is no easy solution. As a matter of fact, I don't think there is even a complicated solution. If anything, there are any number of small things that people do, either to deal with feelings of responsibility on a personal level, or to forget about the problem.

Yet, and I must admit I am an idealist, I believe there is one solution, or at least one, that is extraordinarily complicated. One which touched upon any and all aspects of our life, society and most of all, our world. It is this answer that the scholars and peoples of the world and of all the various fields of study must focus upon. To combine their efforts into a gestalt to solve the greatest problem of our time… How do we survive as humans and come to deserve this world upon which we live? As a species and a fully global community in harmony with the living world around us.

If only the newest generation cared and bent their considerable passion and ingenuity to the task at hand, perhaps then the solution could be reached.

These are the words which I recorded at the time. They remind me of the general thought in my mind. They are not perfect, and much needs to be elaborated on for the idea to be well communicated.

Well, to start at the beginning, it is not that I think that all of today's youth do nothing useful with their potential, quite a few do a goodly amount. However, I don't think it runs upon the lines of the solution about which I am thinking. Further, a great many of them spend most of their time just avoiding conversation about the problems. This is, of course, in my opinion… I will state that one last time, all this is theory, my own.

I remember one time when I was spending an evening with friends and we were playing a game of truth. Not truth or dare, this one was just truth, and don't say that such a game is easy. Try it, it isn't. Towards the end the heavy questions were brought out, one of which ran something like this, 'Do you think the human race is moving to some higher goal and will it get there?' We were being very serious and by the end of the night, people were crying. Like I said… truth is not easy. It is probably one of the hardest things in the world to face up to and still remain standing.

My point being that youth does not very often face the truth. The truth that if nothing is done, we will die, our existence just another scratch mark on the face of the planet. In reality, nothing more than a few specks of dust in the grandness of the universe. For it is nearly infinite, if not completely so and we individuals are but atoms in comparison. I often remember this point best illustrated by the final scenes of the movie Men in Black. If you haven't seen it at least watch the end, it illustrates my point perfectly, if in an abstract fashion.

But I should suppose that my point is youth does not do enough in the right direction. Some of them do one thing, some of them do another. There is rarely ever a union between the fields of study that people choose. The physicists look at this, the philosophers look at that. The environmentalists look around and say, 'What's up here?!' But they don't converge their thoughts. If they did, maybe things could start being figured out. The physicists or whoever is in the process of making all the more deadly weapons, the ones that can kill all of us, they concentrate on doing. But they don't always stop and say, 'Should we? Let's look at all the factors here…' Of course, the environmentalists are doing just that, but they don't control the means of production.

On the flip side, the environmentalists, maybe they're saying, 'Down with the destructiveness of technology!' But we have it so much ingrained in our society and the majority of the people, that nothing short of mass murder/suicide could cleanse the world of it's influence and the desire to use it. We are too much involved with technology to just give it up, so we need the physicists to figure out what can be done with what we have. It's a balance between the two which needs to be made. And the same goes for so many more fields.Eventually if you start looking for the solution you realize that what started out here, now goes there, and there, and there, and there. And don't forget about there! It goes everywhere if you inquire far enough.

And maybe if people would generalize their knowledge a little bit more, they could come to understand the points being made by all the other people in the other fields. Then something could be started here, a great conjunction, a great convergence of the world's knowledge, pressed into an enormous theory of how to fix our little messes all over the place.

But I think I've diverged quite a bit from the main point of my thought. Looking back, perhaps not too much, I can only hope it makes sense to some. And for the moment, I find myself somewhat spent. This is a huge thought in my head. I could write on it for a long time, but not more today. Who knows, maybe it, or whatever comes from it, will become the topic of my life's thesis.