Contrasting our nation’s past to its present, there are over have been 1 million changes that have occurred over the past years. Our economy has just been pummeled against a wall, our generations have dwindled down, and people just aren’t as good-hearted as they used to be. The big picture is starting to paint itself piece by piece, it’s becoming more and clearer to me as time continues. Yet we’ve accomplished nothing at all to stabilize our communities, there has only been attempts. Looking back, our nation’s past was much better than it is now. Today, it’s like a crisis occurring every hour.
Last year, my teacher had told me about the time of when she was just a kid, everything seemed like a story from one of those “And they lived happily ever after” books. I didn’t know how bad our communities have gotten until she told me, she said that kids used to be able to stay out until 10:00 P.M. and not worry about a thing. Nowadays, there are murders occurring daily, and it’s quite frightening. Parents worry about their child getting kidnapped on the way home, getting raped, or even worse, and it’s true. Parents should be overprotective for their own child’s good because all of this is real, it happens everyday, not to you, but to somebody else.
This decade we’re all so caught up in the small problems that we don’t see the larger things that matter. Over one-fourth of the people I know worry about stupid things like, “I hope I can go there today!” It’s as if their attention is undivided for the small things. Now, I’ve never once heard a person who cares so much about their social life say, “I wish my grades were better, I’ll have to try harder.” There are hardly anymore students who really care about their education, the ones that actually sit down and take their time with their work, where they’ll try their best to improve their grades even if there’s only a percent left for improvement. Now, all kids care about are social lives, they only want to have fun, and they’ll just dump their education into a trash can like it doesn’t even matter, but it does.
In the economy we live in now, things weren’t as prosperous as they used to be, job unemployment has increased to a near 9% in the United States. To get a job, you’ll need a high school diploma, and only 57% of high school students are now earning their diploma, while in the year 2006, 69.2% of students were earning their standard diploma, and that was when it was at its highest peak since 1969 when it was at 77%. Today, a person’s education can take them far in life, and it’s the most valuable thing they have, it can get them a job, and they will be successful in a way. But as high school drop out rates increase, and so does unemployment, and our economy is harsh on the people who haven’t even earned a standard diploma. There are going to be more and more homeless people if this pattern continues.
Things will never be the same with the direction we’re heading, and it seems like no one can do a thing about it. Our nation’s people will slowly try to help out over the years, and people will start to care about the environment. We will become a united nation once more and become one large family again.