Are we living in a History chapter?

It’s a normal day at home. I sit at my laptop, searching through my online classes. My eyes hurt, but I still have an assignment. It’s already eleven o’clock by then, and I don’t want to do this — but I might as well do some schoolwork before bed. I pull up my English assignment — they’re usually a nuisance, forcing us students to write and use our brains. But I look at the title — “History Chapter”. I sat back and opened it up, to see the little words dancing across my screen:

“Your assignment for this week is to explain how you’re processing everything going on in the world. What will you remember about these past few months? What do you think is important to tell future generations?”

And suddenly I light up, alert. This was perfect. This was exactly what I loved to do.

With that, I started typing.

Every time I turn on the news, I always pull something from it: The world is a harsh and cruel place. Murder, deaths. Police cases, a divided government. Every abnormal instance is added in — even the slightest of robberies, the smallest of fights. They claim that they DO add positive news. Occasionally I see several stories about a girl that beat cancer, or a little boy providing food for the poor. But they’re not heartwarming. Either the rest of the news overshadows them — there was an earthquake! There was a shooting! — or they are fake, cheating actors who just want their name on the news. Every single time I make myself watch the news, I know I’ll just be bombarded with bad things. I know all I’ll hear is a hurricane there, a shooting there. All I hear will be about some government nonsense, some satire about pointless things.

While journalism does help us — such as to help us prepare for a hurricane they estimate will come this way — it’s too much. Our world seems so violent, so horrible. Even the slightest killing would make it onto the news, adding to the endless flood of murder, the endless flood of negativity. Those are hard lies. There are families that view this as reality — I know that those on the news are real people with real hearts and feelings, who experienced these things first-hand. But not all people encounter such things. Doesn’t everyone deserve to know the truth?

We are living in the most peaceful, the most luxurious time and place in the world. There have always been murders, there have always been hurricanes. If people from older times had digital television and news, it would go like this: Murder. War. Blood. Another nation fell and now their citizens are dying. Poverty. Do you think that we have ever experienced that? Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the world has been at it’s most peaceful time ever recorded in human history. This will not go down in an actual history chapter, I assure you. Human history is just too long and complex for our descendants to learn about a virus that only shook the world, not topple it down. Our descendants will not learn how one man was cruelly killed. Those are just too insignificant for a whole chapter. I agree they may be mentioned, but they probably won’t even have their own subtitle in history books.

The only reason why we think that history will remember this is that we have never seen what real history is, the chaos a real Social Studies chapter would bring. What WILL be in history books is the chaos that unfolds once The United States finally collapses — which will come sooner than anyone dares think. Only then will the world once again descend (or ascend, depending on your opinion) into the world we once knew, before they came and kept an unstable peace on the whole planet.

To answer the question I never addressed, I will remember how I finally had the time to do what I love at home. The only way to be happy in life is to be grateful, and I will be grateful for this time. No matter how many people will die — history will only remember each and every person as a number, a digit upon millions. When we die one day, the most I can hope for is a name on a list. But we will most likely become a number, with the rest of the billions and trillions that came before us.

Finished! With that, I ran it through Grammarly, then sent it off.

I wondered what my teacher would think of it. Would she like it? Would she hate it? I guess I couldn’t really find out — the world was a big place, with so many different opinions. I would have to wait.

A week later, she responded:

“I think one thing we can learn from this time is that people have to respect… I sure do hope that you are wrong, though. I think the events that are happening now are worth telling to future generations…”

I was elated. She had actually given me a unique response! Then I scrolled down to see this:

“I also think you have a future in journalism if you choose to. You are able to express yourself in a clear and concise way. Perhaps you can change what you dislike about journalism so much.”

I then realized — I had a Medium account. Sure, I never really used it since I only went on it periodically — and, of course, I’m only a teenager. How could I possibly expect to post on such a professional website?

But then I thought: Why not? Even if it’s stupid to post it, at least it’ll be on the web. And maybe, in a few years, I could look upon this again and see what I was thinking as a kid.

In conclusion, be optimistic. Look at the world in a bright way. The world isn’t going to make you happy — you make yourself happy. The world isn’t all that bad. It could always be worse. Keep going — and maybe you’ll realize that the world isn’t all that bad after all.