Can Society Really Change?

With Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States we often leave it up to him to decide whether the country is in the right direction. But we have to realize that this country can only change if society changes and that can only happen if the inhabitants change. One is left to think can society change and furthermore, does it even want to?
In my opinion, society has had many a fresh start, including WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, and even the new economic crisis that has struck this past year. Yet society has never made a complete 360° morally, technologically, and economically. These events listed above have assisted our country either technologically or economically, but not once has a major catastrophe ever changed the way people think.
Our society perseveres on the idea of optimism. We place ideas of optimism in things such as prosperity, imperialism, and other things. If we feel that we are thriving in current conditions it isn’t likely that anyone will ever change. What this country needs right now is not necessarily a first African-American president, or another stimulus plan, or imperialism which will lead to a distant form of totalitarianism from oceans away, what we need is justice. We need to change how we treat our citizens, we need to change the contradictory laws that we have set up to keep one group down and keep others up.
To make sure this succeed we need to make a global effort to change the standards and “status quo.” Sometimes we have to disregard the Social Darwinism that we run the world and think with our hearts because only then will we do the right thing. The world today runs off immorality, and I feel that people who are in the positions to change what is going on do not put forth any effort to change anything. And that plays a big part in why we can’t change. So if we start with changing corporate America, we can start change.
But all I can say as a seventeen year old young lady in today’s society is that we can’t keep driving our society in this direction. We’re bound to crash and kill us all. We need a serious change and we need it now.