No matter how positively right, how absolutely infallible you have always been, there’s a virtue in sophomoric audacity. Correctness is a matter of faith; we cannot hope to comprehend all the nuances of what is right and wrong as much as ants can’t hope to understand the complexities and moral depth of a 21st century American life. We, like these beautifully primitive ants, have a role and function in this universe that we find ourselves in, however complicated it may seem. The mysterious ways in which we have unfolded show us that progress for truth, of ourselves and by association the world at large, is a humbling movement.

Our perception of our world is concocted of informational combination. Facts are first gathered, then subject to our seemingly unique human powers of deliberation. We have mollified, ultimately enslaved, what little shards of nature that can affect us by our acquired mastery of its mechanisms. Now, in our bombastic disregard of an existence broader than ourselves, the pendulum swings back haphazardly, and humanity faces an entropic crisis in the advent of global warming.

Throughout history, at even such an exclusive scale as humanity, we’ve been riddled with voices pleading for ideals such as truth, justice, peace and harmony; groups often at odds with the status quo. Coming consistently, diversified by trivialities like culture and color, such principles have been made manifest through many people now of historical value (and surely many more have been lost to circumstance or powerful malice), and are inextricably part of our lives. To render these values powerless through one’s own ignorance, an ignorance tirelessly strived against by the selfless, is a wrong without excuse in such a richly cultivated society.

We have been blessed, and I use the term with weight, _blessed, with a plethora of humans, endowed humanely with their own foibles, who transcended institutionalized stupor in order to topple the towering monoliths of oppression humanity has been plagued with. These people, of the same blood, flesh and water as we, are in a sense purer to the matter from which we are derived, less tainted by the worlds given them. This is not an idolatrous evangelism calling for their worship, but a reminder, a reference to the way things should work, to a state of being.

There is a truth out there, there must be. It only makes sense, in many ways common sense. What many see as heresy or fulmination may just be one of those natural developments that will inevitably permeate universally in our society. Civil and equal rights movements must have been a scary change, even for the most well-intentioned. But it was necessary, not only for the sake of the victims, but for the oppressors themselves to be liberated from their own more subtle chains.

With a track record as enthralling as our own, beautifully struggling for, retrospectively, simple and logical demands, it is a mystery as to how now we still deny and berate the unpopular and new. Truth and beauty will prevail, I can say this with confidence, but the innocent and vulnerable of tomorrow are not guaranteed such security. We must work for the day that the losses we’ve sustained will be mourned for with the same force exhausted for their prevention.