The System

I’ve talked about society and its unrealistic expectations before, but I recently came upon a speech delivered by Haruki Murakami when he was accepting the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, given in Israel in 2009. This beautiful speech caused me to further my thinking on society, or the system, as Murakami calls it in his speech. Murakami mentions how each of us is confronting a wall and we are an egg, essentially fragile but protected by a thin shell. The System is the wall, and no matter what it always seems to win and turn us into this sorts of monsters. Even though the system is supposed to protect us, things always get changed along the way and we’re suddenly hurt by the one thing that we trust most. I always expect the world to be forgiving and beautiful. Yet each day brings us new obstacles; war, bombs, crazy people, death. I guess from this speech I learned to not give in to the darkness. Even if this darkness utterly consumes you and its all you can see for miles, you always have to find the light. Regardless of the horrific things going on around us, we owe it to ourselves and to humankind to uphold our expectations and hopes for the world. Just because terrible things are happening does not give us an excuse to turn into something terrible. My mom always used to tell me that two wrongs do not make a right. We have to continue to look for the positives and to try to make things better for everyone. Making these changes are vital to our world, otherwise we’ve lost all hope. This Earth is truly beautiful, but sometimes things go wrong. We have to keep trying to make things better and continue searching in the darkness for that beautiful, essential light.