It seems that nowadays there is a lot to complain about. Our education system is a joke, the persistent issue of poverty remains unsolved, racism and prejudice flare like red flags, and our political system is speeding to hell in a fast car. In the broad scope of things, we are living and breathing in utter chaos.

Is there a remedy?

This fall I'm taking the junior/senior English class Utopias and Dystopias, taught by Suzanne Linder. We've read the classic "1984" by George Orwell (Big Brother is watching you!), "Herland," a speculation on gender roles and an early conception of a feminist utopia by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and are beginning "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare.

Through the course of the first month of class, we have repeatedly been asked to think about the elements of utopias and dystopias and compare and contrast our findings. We've also been put to the task of creating our own utopias to solve social/emotional/economic issues.

My good friend, Andrea Park, and I have been working together on our latest assignment of conjuring up a utopia that solves a prevalent contemporary issue. We got off to a rough start to say the least. Pondering the solution to all the world's ills isn't as easy as it sounds. Park and I ran into trouble in trying to find a problem to solve that didn't take Einstein's analytical skills.

We first tried to tackle the disparity in America's education system, then tried to find a way to overcome the social stigma surronding sexual topics to try to rid our world of AIDS and HIV, then tried to find a way to bioengineer plants to grow chicken meat in order to eliminate the horrors of factory farming.

We eventually concluded that most of these issues and many others boil down to poverty and the mal-distribution of wealth and resources. We failed to come up with any plausible solutions, aside from communism, which Stalin proved was a means to no end, and gave up.

I have been meditating on the difficulty of solving any of society's problems and came to the conclusion that utopias are an impossibility. There is no way to make any one group of people happy without receiving the wrath of another. Greed, difference of opinion, and fear stand in the way.

Then I began thinking that maybe the state of our economy and society as we live in it now is as close to a utopia as it gets. I know it sounds crazy, especially with the horrific amounts of human suffering, injustice, infringement upon animal rights, and destruction of the environment.

However, everyone, under the Constitution, is theoretically guaranteed the basic human rights that give us almost as much freedom as we can reasonably request.

Yes, the government is corrupt; yes, the tax system drives everyone up a wall and the money never goes exactly where it should (e.g., teacher's salaries); and yes, people are rampantly disrespected and discriminated against due to race and culture.

Yet, our lives are what we make them. There may not be a way to build an all-encompassing utopia but instead of simply giving up in disgust with the mess of society, we can turn to the potentially positive aspects of our world and use them to change what we can.