My goals

     I don't plan on being famous. I'm not beautiful or charming enough for that. But as a millennial with a blog, the idea that I could someday become famous is always in the back of my mind. Like most people, I have a very distinct picture of what fame is supposed to look like. Fame is the person you know nothing about whose face is always in the news in some way. And like most people, I've had it drilled into me that the only way to really change the world is to become famous or powerful. 

     I could be totally wrong, but on at least some level I don't think that's true. The rich are only rich because they keep insisting they should be rich and we let them keep their money. One thing we forget is that the only thing stopping the rich from not being rich is our collective decision to let them live. 

    For me, the problem is that I don't want to be famous, so why do I keep posting things online? I keep dreaming about being famous, but every author knows that there's a difference between what you make up in your head and what happens out in the real world. So if I don't really want to be famous, then what should my goal be? 

    I know the obvious answer is personal fulfillment, but if I wanted to write just for my own amusement, I could just write in a notebook or not publish any of what I write. But I want to do more than that. I know life sucks right now and I want to do something to change it. 

    So that's my goal with this blog; change the world. I know people talk about how art alone can't change the world, that you need to do more concrete things, but here's how I see it. We talk about society and culture as being one and the same, but they aren't. Society, our rules, enforcement, and morals, belong to the rich. They are the people who decide what we are allowed to do and when we are allowed to do it. Culture, arts, music, literature and the like, belong to the masses, people living their day to day lives trying to get by with what they have. People talk about how the rich have more influence over culture than any of us could ever hope to have, but that isn't true. That's never been true. It is true that the stuff rich people like is the stuff that gets preserved, but there's a lot of art that the rich never see but people read every day. The rich can tell us what it's okay to like, but they can't force us to like it. 

     More and more, people talk about being trapped in a world that doesn't care about them. We've forgotten that nothing is forcing us to follow the rules but our goodwill towards our fellow citizens. If we don't want to do something, all we have to do is stop doing it and eventually the rules will change. I don't know this for certain, but I think the problem is that the rich, the people who decide what rules society will follow, are too far removed from the people who's lives they control. That's become more and more obvious to everyone, but because they don't have to leave their mansions, they don't notice that they're decisions are causing huge problems. We need to remind them that they only have power because we let them have power. The moment they push us too far will be the moment they and the wealth they covet disappear forever.