The World Through My Eyes

I believed I was safe, the world was safe until I opened my eyes and realized it was all just a dream. I poured a glass of water and opened my window. A gust of wind stung my face. I stood there for a while thinking of possible ways to change the world. My mind overflowed with ideas, the only stumbling block was how to implement them. 

People will have absolutely different perspectives when you ask them “what do you see out of the window?” It all depends on the age group they belong to and the thought process. If you ask a 5-year-old, they will give a generic answer like, “I see the sun and the trees”. However, if you ask a teenager or an adult, they will give a more distinct answer. 

Normally, when I would open my window, I would like to inhale the fresh air and cherish the natural beauty of the world but in today’s era, that is mission impossible. When I open my window and see outside of it, I feel the fresh air is no longer fresh, the natural beauty of the world has been vandalized by none other than ourselves. All this is the effect of pollution, deforestation, burning of litter, construction and demolition, wildfires, industrial emission, and many other countless causes.

When I look outside my window, I imagine children playing, laughing, enjoying themselves, coming back home from school. However, this is not what I see. Instead, I view children working in fields, factories and mines. I see young girls and boys working as servants and maids. I catch sight of them selling goods in the streets or at the markets. I see their agonized faces when coming back from other people’s houses. I look at their poor health. Due to this, the children lack education. They miss school because they work for extremely long hours and they don’t get enough time to study. All of this results in physical, social, and moral harm to a child and I strongly believe this should be stopped immediately.

The view I wish to gaze at outside my window is justice and equality. I wish to see people treating everyone with respect and kindness. Regrettably, nowadays, you will find only a handful of people treating each other with equality and respect. One of the examples is transgenderism. We, human beings, look down upon transgender people believing that we are absolutely perfect. More than 50% of the people humiliate, harass and discriminate against them. The transgender community lives mostly in poverty and experiences violence at rates far greater than an average person. The widespread lack of accurate identity documents among trans people also has an impact on every aspect of their lives. Other than transgenderism, racism is prevalent. In many countries, people have been killed brutally just because they are black or because they are supporting blacks. 

When I open my window and look outside, I would like to observe a clear and clean view. Although that is not what I see. I see dense smoke from bombs being blasted almost everywhere. I see people with cannons and guns. I notice how people are being killed mercilessly and how nobody is there to take care of them. I observe small children sitting beside the dead bodies of their loved ones hoping and praying they would get up and take them somewhere safe. These helpless people become refugees and I see they are always on the run from one place to another. They suffer from several problems such as domestic violence, forced child marriage. There is also a lack of access to quality health care and psychological support. Young people face particular challenges because of their age and experiences. They carry the scars of war and displacement with them. Sometimes children are forced to flee alone and arrive in different countries as unaccompanied minors.

To sum it all up, none of us can be safe and content if we continue to live in this environment remorselessly. We have vandalized our mother Earth without even realizing the harm we have done to it and the beautiful creations of the Almighty. We have to understand that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. As they say, “What you reap is what you sow”. If we do not value and nurture the wonderful environment bestowed upon us, soon, we will be begging for the basic necessities of life.

Now is the only time to take action and start taking care of the beautiful planet we live on. I desire to see a planet as heavenly as I have seen in my dreams, not a planet that is full of injustice and cruelty. So let’s get together and dream a dream that when we open our window the next time, we will hear laughter, giggles, chirps, and sounds of happy people all around. We will see people helping strangers, youngsters taking care of the elderly, the Whites giving Thanksgiving dinners to the Blacks. I would like to end my desire with some beautiful lines penned down by the poet of all times, Rabindranath Tagore.

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

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