We can save the world if we do it together-

When you’re a child, you watch the Disney movies and think, "I wish I could live like that." You wish you could be a prince or princess, live in a castle, find your one true love, beat the bad guys and have a happily ever after. But have you ever wondered where these stories come from? Or why we don’t see the true meanings and horrors of those stories when we’re children? For instance, the story "Cinderella" comes from the Austrian version, "Aschenputtel".

A story of a girl whose father died when she was very young, leaving her in the care of her evil stepmother, who puts her to work in the house to pay for shelter, food and clothing. She has to wait on the evil stepsisters, does any of this sound familiar yet? Well, it should if you’ve been a diligent reader/ watcher. But what differs from the much-loved Disney Princess Cinderella is that at the end, when the prince comes to collect his princess by showing the slipper around the country and seeing if it fits, in order to fit into the slippers, the stepsisters each cut off something from their feet.

The prince, not noticing anything because of the dresses and his eccentricity at having found his one true love, rides away with each sister, only to be stopped minutes later by the friendly birds we see in the Disney Cinderella, only in the real version, they’re ravens. They cry out to the prince, "Look! Look at her feet! Blood flows from them, she is not the one!" The prince takes the girl back and, as punishment for her foolishness and deceit, the ravens pluck out her eyes, leaving her blind and ugly.

You see the horrors that our beloved Disney movies once were? It’s all well and good to change a story around so that it can be rated G for young children, but the horrors of the real stories seep into the child-friendly versions and children grow up to believe that all bad guys are defeated in the end.

Only, how are we supposed to know who the bad guy is and who the good guy is? There aren’t any princes and princesses anymore (unless you really count the Queen’s family in England as ruling the whole world…) and there are no more dragons to slay. The classic fairytale story has evolved into a twisted, complex story that no one person can understand. Do the alleged "bad" guys we hear about in the news really do what they do because they think they’re being bad? Or do they have their own ideas about their actions, somehow justifying it in their eyes, making what we see as horrible and sinful beautiful and good?

It can’t be understood unless we try. And we have definitely not been trying. Sure, there are just some sick people out in the world who crave blood, destruction and pain, but if you take a closer look at most of the people in the news, if you look into their childhoods, if you could somehow go back in time, you’d find at least one thing that happened to the to trigger their abusive and bad behavior.

In some cases, they may not even know what they’re doing is wrong, because it’s what they were brought up to believe in-it’s the only thing they know. Parents make a bigger impression on their children than anyone would like to let on. Every teenager, no matter where, who, what personality, has once said that they would not grow up to be like their parents. And yet, there they are, living the lives they were meant to live-Living the only way they know how, the way their parents taught them.

Orphans could disagree with this theory-there are also orphan serial killers, murderers, robbers, etc. But the reason they turn out to be like they are could also be traced back to their parents. They were abandoned as children, they spent their lives watching people be taken into loving homes while they had to stay behind and lose their free will, feeling unloved and unwanted. They blame the parents they never knew; never questioning if their parents had no choice or if they really wanted to keep them, but the circumstances weren’t in their favor.

Some orphans even fancy the idea of their parents coming back for them one day, based upon a story a caretaker in the home might’ve told them, or rumors about the child that the older orphans made up. Its things like these that make people bitter, make people want other people to hurt as much as they did when they were growing up. They see it as a huge injustice to be left alone when so many other children are staying at home with their parents, safe and loved, with a family that knows them. Those children have pictures of their infancy, they have birth certificates, and they have people who will love them no matter what.

Can we really blame them for feeling that way? If you were to be taken away from your mother and father all of a sudden and you knew they didn’t want you and you would never see them again, how mad would you be? Imagine growing up with that, but you’d never known your parents. They were just blank faces in a crowd, not looking for you, not caring. You would be mad. But it all depends on what kind of person you make yourself out to be.

If you’re the kind of person who sticks up for everyone, the kind of person who cares whether a bully is being beaten up, a person who wants to make the world a better place in hopes that no one will have to go through what you went through, I think it’s very safe to say that you won’t become a bitter serial (-parent) killer. But who knows? You could be the happiest child in the world and you could still have a thing for killing people. It’s very hard to determine why people kill each other. For power? For money? For the rush? Do they have a choice or are they being forced?

There are a million different reasons someone could become a killer when they’re older. But if we all chip in and try to make the world a better place, we would all live a lot longer. You never know if someone is going to stop you on the sidewalk and kill you seven months later after following your every move. You can’t see into the future, no matter how hard you try. The future is a mystery, one that doesn’t like to be solved so easily.

A small smile could go a long way in this world, because, we have to face it, we’re all interconnected with each other. I know a boy in America who knows a girl in America who knows some people in Korea, who know some people in Russia, who know some people in Italy, who know some people in Austria, who know some people in Vienna, who know some people who know me. There are over 6.6 billion people on this Earth. Who’s to say we don’t know everyone if we just look at who we’ve met before?

The moral of this story: Not all things in life are easy, not all things are pretty, but if you see the best in life, you can make that smile go a very, very long way. And that’s the first step towards making this world a better place to live. Because if we keep on going at the rate we’re going at now, by the year 3000, there will be no Earth. We’ll have destroyed it so badly that no one will be alive and everything will go further to hell than it is now.