HAVE you ever found a noticeable crack in your house? A small, hairline fissure on the surface of your wall, perhaps? Or you may have seen a crack on your floor, running across a tile in a corner of a room you generally do not use. The crack may have been quite noticeable— but only to those not accustomed to seeing it. To you, the crack has become a part of your natural environment. In fact, it is no longer even a crack or an indication of damage, but simply a feature of your home—no different from the orientation of your furniture or the colour of your walls. After a certain amount of time, you do not even notice the crack, much less think about remedying the issue.
However, one day, you notice that the crack has widened. It has spread across a large section of your house now, much like a seed that has sprouted roots. Will you continue to let it grow?
Our world is peppered with many noticeable cracks across its seemingly smooth surface. Throughout our lives, nearly everyone in our population encounters these cracks and has the chance to learn about them. However, once they have finished learning about them, the cracks are forgotten and left behind to grow. They are seen as a natural part of the environment we live in, and remedying them is believed to be a Herculean task whose costs far outweigh the benefits. It is not ignorance that guides this behaviour, but sheer indifference and a disconnect from the reality of the depth of the problems that plague our world. We have simply become so used to seeing the cracks that they no longer seem like a problem to us—especially not when they do not have a direct effect on us.
When we learn about certain periods in the history of our world, we tend to experience a mix of deeply unpleasant emotions. We are disgusted by the injustices that people in the past have suffered. Most importantly, we find ourselves asking the same question over and over again: why did so many people go along with those injustices? In a world filled with both good and bad people, why does history seem to record periods where the ‘good’ people never stood up to injustice or at least refused to go along with systems that oppressed innocent people? Across different countries and in different situations, there have been significantly long periods when unspeakable atrocities were committed against human beings.
However, in those eras, those cruelties were seen as nothing more than cracks on the surface of society—normal parts of the world that did not need to be remedied unless they began to affect the greater population.
The truth is, so many people went along with cruel systems because they refused to spend the energy to understand the very real effects those systems had on fellow human beings. After all, it is easier to ignore cracks than to discover the extensive and dangerous damage hiding beneath the surface.
We are not so different from our indifferent predecessors. We too have adopted the habit of ignoring and overlooking issues that do not have a direct impact on us—especially if speaking up is not considered socially acceptable.
Although Generation Z has already proven itself to be quite proactive in speaking up about important issues, there is still so much more we can achieve together. While calling attention to a problem is crucial to remedying it, we must continue working to develop innovative solutions to eradicate those issues entirely.
We can start by helping other generations see issues as much more than surface-level cracks. Showing each other the reality behind so many problems can help garner help towards solving them. Similarly, we can also start by patching up the cracks in our own homes and communities—admonishing unjust behaviour whenever we see it. In this way, we can create real change. All we need to do is stop ignoring the growing cracks.