Lack of gratitude being shown

It was either stay and get attacked or leave without knowing if you will survive or not. Omran Daqneesh was one of the many people who chose to stay even with the knowledge of getting blood all over his face from the airstrike rumble. However, he was soon rescued by a worker.

Daqneesh was just a nine year old Syrian boy in Allepo, Syria who experienced an event that most of the students at SHS could  never imagine. What moved me so much was how, in the video, Daqneesh wasn’t even surprised when he touched blood on his face. It was as if he had been through that situation before.

Unlike Daqneesh, if it were me, I would freak out a little which of course would be normal. However, normal is different in different parts of the world. For example   having some type of technology, device or television for entertainment is not something many people have access to. We take many things for granted, like buying food that we don’t really want, and it ends up in the trashcan. Meanwhile some children in other countries are lacking shelter wondering if they will survive or not. Many of the things we take for granted, such as hot water, beds, fridges and many countless items roaming around our homes, are prayed for by many people in need.

While watching the video of Daqneesh, I realized how many of us take things for granted.

My day was not going well as it usually did. As I was sitting and thinking about how hard my life was, I realized it wasn’t even comparable to the people who were trying to survive the airstrikes. But, it’s not just airstrikes, people from all over the continent are facing way more difficulties than me .  Coming across that story made me feel really foolish. It made me ponder  how much we ignore the little things in our life. We tend to only realize the important things in our lives when they perish.

Sophomore Emmanuel Liantu also believes that many students, even at SHS, take many things for granted. He believes one of the biggest things people take for granted is school. Many students don’t realize how lucky they are to be going to be school for free, Liantu says.

The morning comes, however we don’t stop to think about how something could happen to us during the times we were asleep.  We don’t think about how parts of our body systems could have gone dysfunctional.  We drive from school or work without even thinking about how we could have been in an accident. Most of us, without realizing this, instead drive recklessly or don’t even think about what could happen to us and the effects of those possibilities.

Many people do not know the blessing it is to be born in a hospital. When a child is born in a hospital, the mother and the baby have all of their needs provided to them. However many people are not afforded this overlooked opportunity. For example,being birthed in my house was pretty rough for my mother, as I was told. There wasn’t any medicine that could relieve her pain. She just had to find a way to deal with it, as most of the women in our township, located in Chin State, did.

One of the many ways to always finding happiness is counting all the blessings that one has received, invisible or visible. The majority of us go through rough times, however we cannot make that as an excuse for taking things for granted. How we approach those situations are what makes us more humane.

“When it comes to life, the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude,” English writer Gilbert Chesterton said.