The Lowdown

Selfishness is such a pretty word for its insolence. I realize now more than ever that if there’s one thing that has quietly swept across the globe faster than that scary year syphilis hit Leeds Uni it is this. Impartial to background, ethnicity or spiritual correlation, selfishness lives in students, children, adults and even old senile delinquents on anti-hallucinates: used mostly to stop them making out with lamp posts.

And I am not talking about small scale selfishness; we all know no one wants to share their last chip with anything that is showing any hints of life. So no one is blaming you for this, but there are bigger accounts of selfishness worthy of this 600 word indulge.  

The world is breeding a population that is completely self-obsessed faster than a Mc Donald’s breeds headless footless chickens, and students are its production. Surely not you may say, because students are not the ones sitting on the side of the road, eating fish and chips and waiting for their benefits to come in. But being slightly better than the lazy guy doesn’t make you non-lazy it just makes you slightly better than the lazy guy.

I loved the way that youtube clip ‘Gap yah’ was hailed by the masses, it wrung humour out of the reality that students spend a year doing fleeting excursions aimed at making some form of a difference. When the truth is that although these are relevant and very worthy of a ‘goody’ badge, the world is in a backlog because of fleeting attempts to better it. Winding wheels are the only things that cause motion not stagnant ones and this is what one week, one month, one year trips are. In the end the only thing making any progress is your C.V. It is easy to get wrapped up in your own world, everybody does this. But the cold hard fact is that your unshaven legs do not compare to a child dying because they couldn’t get water.

Now I am not saying tear your clothes off, burn all flight tickets and become a hermit in a German research facility that concentrates on turning Urine into drinkable fluids(firstly its already been done – Ribeno), but let the thought settle and re-evaluate how you can impact the word with consistency. For some of you it is literally as small as being a religious recycler, for others starting a group that helps struggling teens find their dreams (sidenote : no one is forcing you to do this, the English teenager is a very scary animal). But the world is looking for long lasting revolutions and just because you are not an MP doesn’t make you any less capable of stealing money from the masses – I mean – doesn’t make you any less capable of impacting the world.