Fred Rogers aired the first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1968 with a very specific goal in mind, he sought to bring a positive change to children’s television. Right around the air date Bobby Kennedy was assassinated and in the show he worked to explain the concept of assassination to children watching the program. This was not an isolated incident, he spoke on death, racism, war and many other challenging subjects that children had not yet been exposed to. On the surface these episodes seemed simple with some puppets talking bullshit for twenty-five minutes and then Fred coming in to talk about something challenging for five minutes, but this wasn’t the case at all! Every episode had a message ingrained in it, the topics discussed were extremely well thought out and were able to educate the children in an inoffensive way.
Fred Rogers is a hero of determination. In a market where children’s shows could be cheap, easy to produce, and profitable he instead took a vastly different approach. Fred Rogers didn’t have to, but he did because he believed in something. We must all find something to believe in.
My mom always used to say to me “leave this place looking better than you found it.” and I think that is what we should do with our world. It is very easy to be apathetic. We are all tiny pieces of an ever-growing puzzle currently sitting at seven and a half billion pieces. So, it is easy to just fade away into the background, to just be okay. But it isn’t okay to be okay! It is not possible to leave the Earth in a better state than you found it by just passing through, you must strive towards something.
I don’t want to be misconstrued, you do not have to go out of your way to do as much good as possible for everyone around you. What you must do however, is at least fucking try. Try to do life with some, “oomf”, put in some work, and take the time to make things run a little bit better. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if everyone put effort into their relationships, if they really strived to make them loving and strong. Now imagine if everyone put effort into their jobs, didn’t half-ass anything, imagine how much smoother the world would run.
There is one more part to this equation, a step between apathy and determination, and that’s motivation. Motivation is driven by love and by hate. It is a deep and personal drive to achieve something you are unsatisfied with. If one hates their image, they become motivated to change it. If one loves the idea of being more wealthy, they strive to be wealthy. I am no different. I hate my depression, truly and sincerely. I hate it so much that not only do I hate it in myself, I hate that others have to experience it as well. I have channeled this hate into motivation, a motivation to fix a problem that is plaguing the world.
There is no determination without motivation, and without either there is apathy. I fear a world where we all become apathetic, where everything becomes too grand for us to feel important. So to those reading this, I would like you to ask yourself, what are you driven by? If the answer is that you don’t know, or that it’s too hard to achieve, search harder. After all there really is only one wrong answer here and that is that is “it does not matter”. So I encourage you now, search deep and find what motivates you, then put it into action. You will be doing the world a favor. I will leave you now with a quote by Norman Vincent Peale, I hope that it helps you on your way, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”.