I have found that the failure of the world exists within multiple conditions. 

The first is how the youth die young and the old outlive us. The catastrophic death tolls skyrocket behind any and every border at an age when they are just barely learning how to live. 

In The New York Times article “Young Adolescents as Likely to Die From Suicide as From Traffic Accidents” by Sabrina Tavernise, she says “In all, 425 children ages 10 to 14 killed themselves in 2014. In contrast, 384 children of that age died in car accidents.”

 If you don’t know what the problem is; imagine your life being ripped away at age ten, before ever knowing the high points of life like following your dreams, falling in love, finding a place where you belong, and finding people who make you believe. 

The second wrong is how we witness and leave children to suffer in hunger and dehydration due to outdated systems or based on geographical locations. Under Food Aid’s website in Hunger Statistics shows only 10 facts that are shocking and heartbreaking, one of those is that “poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five — 3.1 million children each year.” 

Imagine becoming a mother, barely able to feed yourself, and working yourself into the ground every single day to keep your baby alive only to watch them die of starvation. Another bullet listed piece of information is, “some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life.” That’s about one in nine people on earth. These problems aren’t of nations, they aren’t fictional lines scraped into the Earth by the blood sweat and tears of countries young men with whatever confusing and all knowing source of unchangeable laws. It’s a problem of humanity. 

The third condition is in how our heroes who fought and died for our freedom are left homeless in the streets and never hear gratitude. I have heard the hate and disdain from people about the homeless, but all I see are men and women scraping together coins and shivering in numbing cold. I see their eyes staring back hoping to survive and once again believe in human kindness.

 The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans site goes into detail about which wars many of our heroes came from and why they are left on the streets. “Nearly half of homeless veterans served during the Vietnam era. Two-thirds served our country for at least three years, and one-third were stationed in a war zone.” Too many people have forgotten where our freedom has come from and who fought until their last breath in defending it.

They are described as homeless from the horrors they have witnessed and must live with, “In addition to the complex set of factors influencing all homelessness – extreme shortage of affordable housing, livable income and access to health care – a large number of displaced and at-risk veterans live with lingering effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance abuse, which are compounded by a lack of family and social support networks.”

The last condition is the fact that the human race turn their heads to injustice and inhumane suffering, even abiding by it as a bystander, never changing the wrongs only to sweep them under the rug for the next generation to endure. 

Society asks me to live with the hollow feeling, a knowingness that tells me what is wrong, to blend into the crowds that seamlessly turn to walk away. They want us to work away our lives for money and trivial pursuits, yet I see the footsteps of those who strayed from standing, falling and perhaps dying for causes.

I beg you, don’t close your eyes. Please, hear the world for what it is and then do something, because every single second you turn away for convenience, you are leaving your humanity behind.