Fledglings

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

This morning I was having a conversation with my friend, and we got to talking about college (We are both High School Seniors). That got me thinking about how humans are some of the only animals that live with their parents for an average of 18-20 years of their lives. Take birds for example: some birds are independent the moment they hatch from their eggs. Even birds with longer fledging periods only stay with their parents for up to 20 months.

So while I was thinking about college and birds and preparation for my future life, I began to also think about progress. I started to wonder: if humans are so well-educated and so well-prepared for our future, and we have the most brain capacity of all the animals on this planet; why do we use the least amount of brain power to do some of the most insignificant things? There are plenty of things that we have accomplished in the history of the human race that we should be proud of. However, there are also plenty of things we have done to be ashamed of.

When I brought this up with my friend, he agreed with me. He said, “Look what humans do. They argue, they hate, and yet, they also have the innate ability to love”. What a contradiction. We constantly argue and fight over this planet and yet we claim that we love it. We destroy the environment while, at the same time, we advocate for it. How can we do all these things at once?

The answer is, it’s easy to have beliefs, but it is so much harder to act on those beliefs. How many people do you know that say they care about energy conservation but won’t even buy just one LED light for their house? So what I think is: if you have a belief, stick to it. An action is less meaningful without a belief behind it. However, if you do care about something greatly, you should act on it.

Speaking of actions, I think I’m going to ask my parents to buy more LED lights for our house.