Every organization in the world, every political group, every parent, thinks that they are needed forever. They aren’t.
A long time ago I talked about how the myth of the fragile Earth is doing nothing but hurting the environmental movement. They think “ZOMG, what will the Earth do without us,” but this is a very humanocentric view. The Earth will actually be fine without us. She will survive great– it’s us that will die if we don’t fix this stuff.
The same applies to a lot of situations– conservatives think the United States will go to the heathens without them. Liberals think corporations will take over the country unless they legislate. Both these things may be true (they’re in the future, so who knows), but both ignore the reactions that these incidents would provoke. Neither exist in a vacuum.
Your children will be fine, even if they do drugs. They’ll even be fine if they fall off their bike and hurt their head. Everything will be fine, pretty much no matter what.
Your child will recover and fix his mistakes. Liberals will move to Canada or Europe, creating a brain drain on those countries. Conservatives will move to the Bible Belt or to states where taxation hinders them less. All these are reactions, and none of them mean the end of the world.
Everything is a flow. Very little is an abrupt stop.
History shows that the stock market generally trends upward, with corrections here and there. Likewise, culture generally gets more lenient and progressive (with similar “corrections” like the repealing of Prop 8). This happens everywhere, but it won’t change which direction we’re going.
What you need to do is prepare and place yourself at the crossroads of trends, not worry about whether the world will vanish. There is nothing down that road.
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