Future Forward Thinking

Do you ever find yourself worrying about the future, what’s going to happen to you? Your children, siblings, parents and friends. Do you ever worry about the state of the economy, the social issues we face every day or the current TRUMP-sized political climate? Do you worry about climate change, health issues or the moral decay of society? Well I do and I can tell you I am not the only person who worries about these things, I am not the first person neither am I the last.

So let’s ask ourselves if there are people who think about these things constantly and there are people who saw all these things coming how did we end up here?

The answer is simple, ignorance.

When I applied to do my undergraduate degree in Community Driven Development and Leadership in 2011, my first choice was actually a BA in Politics but I reconsidered it thinking that I actually wanted to do something that had more to do with developing people in relation to socio-economic issues. My degree is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life, and this is based on the fact that it completed me and made me more of who I am, it made me realize that social, economic, and political issues are all interconnected but the factor that moves all three is the human factor.

If humans make the right decisions, using knowledge, wisdom planning and processes, every economic and political issue we are faced with today would not be an issue at all. We would study what the problems are and fix them according to decisions that benefit all human beings instead of some. We would realise that every short term selfish decision humans make will turn into long term problems that will cost more to fix in the future than they would have in the past when they started. However the problem with most human beings is ignorance. 

Actually we are worse than ignorant. The textbook definition of ignorance is “a lacking of knowledge or awareness in general”.

We are a generation that does not lack knowledge, we ignore it.

We do not lack awareness, we are aware but we don’t care. 

As bad as all this may seem I do not believe all of it is our fault. I believe that the system has trained us to think this way, to think for now and not for the future, to consume only for ourselves and not with the thought of all humanity, to live to destroy and not to build for future but mostly to live as separate entities instead as brothers and sisters of the human race.

So how can we change this?

We can change this by thinking towards and for the future.

Future Forward Thinking.

If we know for a fact that the environment is in danger and if we know for a fact that Global Warming is real. We should not just speak about it, we should do something. We should think for the future and not just for today. Let us think for our children who will have to inherit the environment that we leave for them, let us think of all God’s creatures even those that don’t know that a God exists.

We know that the economy is bad; we see our cousins, brothers and sisters even those who have graduated from good schools struggle to get jobs. We know that all the money sits with the top 1% while the bottom 99 % work for those who have more than they need. 

We know that the economy favours the rich and turns its back on the destitute; we know that the child from Soweto even when he graduates and gets a great job has to pay for 30 years of his families burdens by taking on responsibilities that the child from Sandton doesn’t even know exist.

So let us think for the future, let us invest money in informal trading to assist those who do not have the skill or interest to enter the corporate world. Let us make universities and colleges affordable for those who cannot afford them but need an education to move forward in life. Let us vote for politicians that want more for us than they want for themselves. Let us fight the greed in corporate and private systems with the same vigor we choose stand against greed in the public sector. Let us find ways of making South Africa and Africa less dependent on the western world by changing the mentality of our young people, creating more innovators and entrepreneurs. Let us invest in the future by literally investing in the future which is through the youth.

When you look at this country you can tell it was built by smart people, pioneers, innovators, discoverers. So I do believe that there people in the apartheid government who knew that apartheid was destined to end. I mean slavery, segregation and many other human rights violations were abolished all over the world at that time, so you can’t tell me in that whole entire government there wasn’t one person intelligent enough to see this coming. So if I was one of these people I would have warned the government, we should gradually start decolonizing this country, we should slowly start building more cities to combat rural urban migration, we should educate more of “these people” and distribute more wealth because soon enough they will outnumber us and when they do most of them will be uneducated, most of them will be without jobs, land or means of production, most of them will realize that we have been robbing them blind for years and when this day comes they will jump over our high walls and take what belongs to them. The apartheid government might have built this country but they built it on an unstable foundation blinded by greed and prejudice.

If the apartheid government had applied a Future Forward Thinking mentality to their policies we would live in a much better South Africa and a better society.

So to you my fellow South Africans and inhabitants of the planet earth, I say to you: begin first with thought and then with action.

I say to you, do not only think of yourself and where you come from but think for those who will soon inherit this earth and where they will go if we destroy it.

Think beyond today and towards tomorrow.

Think for the future.