I'm tired of this crappy world

Definitely.
Family, friends, neighbours first - build local community spirit again
Stop reading, watching, listening to the news and media - They are supposed to be impartial and objective but they are not. They want the high drama and everyone in a state. None of them impart the whole truth and it's too easy to be drawn into things we have no control over.
Take up a hobby, do something with the family (but don't completely forget about your digital friends .)

Cheers

Tony

The problem with "local community first"/"friends and family first" is:



Written by Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the German people following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

In the US today you could easily replace Socialists with Environmentalists, Trade Unionists with Mexicans and Jews with Muslims.

But my friend you are missing the point of this thread, it's not all the ifs and buts just what makes us feel better.

life is better the less you worry and speculate about, worry about the world and you have a worlds worth of worries

it not that we don't care, it's just we need to bring it home a bit.

Well, look at it this way... How can I change the ills of the world if I cannot change the woes of home? Moreover, how can I help others if I cannot help myself?

It's a problem that environmentalists and conservationists run into time and again. Human beings aren't yet at the point where they can look at the world and see that we're all on this miracle of a rock together. No. We're still bitter about race, gender, sexualities, class, all manner of artificial divisions that we apply on ourselves. We push others down because it makes us feel more important. We see the great yawning chasm of the cosmos, the potential to be utterly alone in the world -- let alone the universe -- and we try to fill it by making ourselves its centre. However, one of the fundamental things that we as a species keep missing is that life is so much more tolerable when we ourselves are more tolerant.

We are getting too old and too wise as a species to keep acting like we did when we lived in caves. We know better. We need to be better than what we already are and that ultimately has to start with you. People have this stupid pack instinct where they desperately need to be part of the greater whole. To be ostracised is considered a fate worse than death and I think the time has come to start standing up for people at home who aren't like you.

We started in villages, we moved to cities, then metropolises, then finally we may have started looking at other worlds. Could you consider the woes of an entire solar system? Nope. Not anymore than people living in villages could truly comprehend the troubles of the world. That's why we have countries to begin with, it is to change the face of an entire planet in small partitions, yet even that is becoming obsolete. We are growing into a new mentality that encompasses what was previously only ever dreamed of -- we are taking responsibility for the actions of all across an entire world. Naturally, there are going to be teething problems. It's not a bad thing, we've only got one Earth, after all.

It's important to dispel the stupid idea that your actions don't matter because ultimately they do. You have a responsibility to this planet and its people in this moment of transition and as Charles Darwin pointed out, it wasn't the strongest species that survived nature, it was the one most responsive to change. Change your own realm, change your part of the world, change the world. Act, move and you'll find that like-minded people, irrespective of background, will move with you, TinDogPodcast.

Sitting back and blaming others isn't going to solve anything. That's what lead to this state of affairs to begin with. Think about it... People don't want democracy, you say. Where are you likely getting this information? If you're getting it from the media, I can see a fundamental paradox in your basic reasoning; i.e. that they are liars, yet the information is accepted anyway.

I like the idea of "Think globally, act locally". More than ever, what we do locally can make a positive impact globally. More than ever, we have the ability to communicate globally - a good idea or a sound philosophy or just something heartwarming and restorative like cute kitten videos can travel a long way fast these days. Spend a weekend in your kitchen perfecting a healthy recipe that's actually pleasant to eat and you just might end up preventing ten heart attacks and two strokes when someone posts it on their FB.

Lots of things you can do to make change. Consider finding a charity that you approve of and feel you can trust, a local one, or a global one with transparency. (That can be even more meaningful if the class divide manages to widen in the coming years. We had seniors the next town over reported in the papers to be literally living on catfood after having been wedged between the cost of medicines and the cost of food/oil just prior to the Obama administration). Maybe the occasional local family or child that you feed will remember your gift and go on to perform charitable acts of their own on account of it that magnify your good deed tenfold, maybe an underprivileged child who receives a giveaway computer or tablet will develop a love of learning and science and medicine and grow up to be a missionary doctor.

Maybe if someone puts a Big Finish CD in a Christmas toy drive bin, a child will grow up to be an adorably eccentric inventor who invents an irrigation system that saves a country's drought-stricken crops (or at least if one donates a Big Finish CD to a local library, maybe someone will be delighted to stumble across it and go on to buy the whole BF catalog, thus helping to stabilize the British pound itself). Maybe I'm delirious, and maybe things like that have happened already, who knows?

I'm fond of charitable causes, when I can find them, that promise to make the most of a little. I've given to charities before that make gifts of seeds to farmers who have suffered crop failures, or animals like goats that are useful in the long run as livestock, because these are things that with luck go on to make more of same so that in theory my dollar may still be at work being helpful further down the road. (That may also extend to seeds of useful plants such as mosquito repellents for areas at risk for malaria or even medicinal plants, if anyone's presently doing that). One barely has to do the math on things like that to remember that a little good in the world really can make a considerable amount of change for the better. Why not? Good deeds ought to be at least as entitled to their unending repercussions as dumb deeds sometimes are :-)

Put beautifully, Barnabaslives!

3 words

Pay It Forward ...

The message was in the film - start small. Do something good for someone local, they do something for someone else, so on and so on. If we all did that, the world would be a better place.

Cheers

Tony

A great idea .

And following on ... it's very easy to get wrapped up in the bigger picture when small gestures also make a difference.

Cheers

Tony