Think!

This was an essay for English I Honors. The prompt was "persuasive essay directed at my individual class as the audience".

Society constantly tells us to be independent, to be creative, to be unique, but in a world with 7 billion people how can we possibly be individuals? Everyone is shaped by their friends and family. Each person’s environment helps form who they are. We allow ourselves to be lost in the rush. We let our ideals be shaped what everyone tells us. We turn off our minds and become cookie cutters. Our opinions can no longer be deciphered from the views of those sitting next to us; thinking has become a tedious process. Amidst being bombarded with the views of the rest of the world we must start to think for ourselves while still allowing ourselves to be mentored.

Everyday we swim through hundreds of advertisements, posters and others’ opinions. We walk through acres of propaganda. We are children. We are told to watch and to learn. We listen as our relations express their opinions. We carefully watch as our parents assess politics. We carefully temper our very selves to meet the standards of others. Our preferences can be affected by the likes and dislikes of those around us. Our political opinions are often impressions of our parents’. We are frequently born into a religion that we did not choose. Our very essences can be boiled down and auctioned off to the world around us.

We need to think for ourselves. We need to gather information from the tangible world around us and formulate our own thoughts. We need to beat off our apathy and actually pay attention to politics as they happen, not hear the faulty facts through the grapevine. We need to stop swallowing the half-chewed conjectures of others. We need to stop adopting other generations’ conceptions of issues. We need to shut down our computers, to stop accepting everything that is told to us; we need to drag out the dusty textbooks and examine the facts for ourselves. In the end we may come up with the same thoughts that our parents did, but we need to come up with those thoughts on our own.

Admittedly, we need mentorship. Without someone to show us the ropes, we would be awfully confused about the huge world that we live in. Our parents have had at least a couple more decades to figure things out than we have, so we should listen to them. Being born into something as stable as a religion can be comforting. Politics are complicated and our parents have good reasons (hopefully) for the beliefs that they have. We wouldn’t have the diverse world we have today if we didn’t have seas of media and oceans of styles and trends set for us. Yes, we do need influences, but they need to be balanced; not to be allowed to run rampant through our impressionable minds just as they are taking first struggling steps towards individuality.

We are who we are because of our influences, but after that helpful boost we need to take off our training wheels and ponder things alone. Our young minds are powerful and clean, do not allow them to be polluted by the washed-up ideas of other generations. Think for yourself, and you may find that you are an individual with unparalleled intelligence. We are each our own person, so why on earth would we allow our singular minds to be sullied by the views that already exist? The world needs our new thoughts to sustain it, not the values that already exist.