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| I hate povertyI love ice cream. I love free stuff. Put it together and today was heaven for me - Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day. 30th anniversary, yo. We stood in line for half an hour, but it was worth it. Free Cone Day was in association with some teen organization that didn't do much of anything, but there was also advertising for 'One.' An organization to fight poverty. And fittingly, I had been thinking about poverty today.
We went to get gas for our car today and the prices were insane. And so my mom gave us a talk that basically said: recession's basically here, prices go up, income stays the same, which means our lifestyle must adjust. Neither my mom nor my dad were part of privileged families growing up. I mean, the 70's were obviously hard for everyone. Our family now, though, has been ridiculously blessed. But with the recession, a comfortable lifestyle is going to change for a lot of families . . . so what is that going to mean for the people who were barely getting by before?
Jesus said that the poor will always be among us. Poverty has been no stranger to history. The UN defines poverty as living on or less than about a dollar a day, and estimates that nearly half of the global population (3 billion people) fits this criterion. The US is about 5% of the global population. The US holds about 24% of the globe's wealth. About 1 in 5 children in the US live in poverty. It has been said that 760,000 people are homeless on any given night in the United States.
But thinking about this is gut-wrenching. I hate it, I really hate it. I hate thinking about it. There are few things that drive my heart to such violent emotion as when I think of poverty. That's partly why I chose The Glass Castle as my dramatic interp because when I read it I was affected, even if I did a lousy job of interping it. (Read it, by the way.) My parents tell me stories of when they were kids, and it makes me sick. When I visited DC, Lee, Baddeck, and drove through various places, I cried inside for these homeless people and these struggling to make ends meet. I wrote about how horrible it all was, but put it aside because I didn't want to reread what I had written.
But as much as it pains me to think about poverty or to see it in front of me, I can't just force it out of my mind. How selfish, to simply cope with being uncomfortable with reality. How selfish, to not suffer inside with those who physically suffer. How selfish, to pretend that things are something they're not. But I'm just a person, just an apathetic teenaged girl, with no real knowledge of poverty, with no real experience with poverty, and with just a general queasy conviction that maybe I should do something about it. I have zero qualifications to share my heart on poverty because there is so little I really know.
I volunteer once in a while at local missions. I love freerice.com. I pray often for people I know personally who have financial troubles. And yet it seems like I could do bigger things, and yet I'm not. But I'm going to San Francisco this June with Ignite (my youth group) through Youth With A Mission (YWAM.) I really have no idea what I've signed up for. But I'm hoping I'll be given an opportunity to tell someone about Jesus? And maybe God will use what I see there to turn me into something He can use to actually serve, rather than just pity, the poor. | | |
| What's your favorite movie? Why?I love watching movies. It is my all-time favorite way to spend time. So picking just one is kind of hard. But my current favorite is Catch Me if You Can, yeah, with Leonardo diCaprio, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielburg. Why? Because it's inspirational. It was funny, because I saw it the week before my 16th birthday. And in the movie you have this kid, just turned 16, his life is falling apart, so he runs out of there and becomes a pilot. Then a doctor. Then a lawyer. He travels the world, and granted, he rips off a lot of people, but he had the ambition to achieve amazingly high heights. All starting shortly after his 16th birthday. When I first saw it I was really worried about where my life was headed and whether or not I had the capacity to aim high, and watching this movie gave me the encouragement to do big things in the here and now. I don't have to wait to grow up to make an impact. God can use me here and now.
I have seen a lot of really excellent movies in my short life, and dozens of wonderful movies come to mind, but only a few that have been real, long-standing favorites. So, runners up were:
Beauty and the Beast: long time favorite movie. It's witty, colorful, clean, and the themes are so positive and uplifting. Sacrifice, intelligence, love. I love the story, and I love the characters, and I love the songs.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: You cannot beat the silliness of this movie. I'm a big geek about the importance of history, so I like that aspect of the movie, but mostly it's just quotable fun on film. And you gotta love Keanu Reeves.
The Princess Bride: It's a family classic. I was raised on this film, I was saying "Have fun storming the castle" before I ever even saw the movie, and it's lovable on every facet. You've got romance, comedy, action, drama, and fantasy, all thrown together. The book is even better.
I have a lot of other favorite movies, certainly not limited to, but encompassed by the following:
The Prestige, Awakenings, A Beautiful Mind, Master & Commander, 3:10 to Yuma, Little Women, Batman Begins, Newsies, Pocahantas, Empire of the Sun, The Court Jester, Anne of Green Gables, Pride & Prejudice, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, White Nights, Timeline, Robin Hood, Back to the Future, Anastasia, Pirates of the Caribbean, Much Ado About Nothing, The Princess Bride, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, On the Line, The Last Samurai, The Importance of Being Earnest, Ocean's 11, Ocean's 12, Ocean's 13, Dead Poets Society, Day After Tomorrow, Maverick. I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
I didn't take the picture, by the way. | | |
| Tobacco products kill 1,200 people a day in the US, but it rarely makes the evening news. How come?Because no one really cares! Ugh! I'm starting to get really upset about all this anti-tobacco propaganda on Xanga. If people want to destroy their bodies by smoking, then let them. It is their right, and in American they should have the freedom to do so, without some bureaucratic corporation breathing down their neck. Between diplomacy, the economy, and social issue, journalists have better things to cover.
It find it to be such a queer anomaly that left-wing activists are to passionate about outlawing tobacco, drugs, drinking, and yet are also so passionate about legalizing abortion, euthanasia, untraditional marriage. This inconsistency confuses to no end. More rights, more rights, for minorities, for animals, for the environment. Less rights, less rights, for the alcohol swigging, drug shooting, tobacco smoking. What the heck? Find a philosophy and stick with it.
Many people die each day from suicide. Many people die each day from car accidents. Many people die each day from a lack of organs available for transplants. Many people die each day from preventable diseases around the world. And many people die each day from destructive habits that include tobacco. Yeah, none of these things get much press time. And why? Because it's a fact of life. These things happen to everyone, and usually only one person has the power to stop it. Not a government mandate. I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too! | | |
| Driving - a lot harder than I thoughtI finished the torturous 33 hours of driver's education at the end of January, and I have 1/3 of a driver's license: a permit. Wewt for graduated licensing! So my dad took me for my first driving lesson . . . in the snow. We practiced turning and stuff in a tiny parking lot. It wasn't really real driving. Then, a week later, my dad took me for a second lesson, and we went on an actual road. I was driving for four minutes on RT 116 and when I went to make the turn onto RT 12 (did I mention I had a huge black pickup truck on my bumper? RI drivers get mad when people drive the speed limit.) I almost crashed into the guard rail.
Then, that night, I went with my mom to Whole Foods. (I bought this $20 moisturizer there that doesn't even work! But aside from that, I really love Whole Foods. Except their chips. Nasty.) We finish shopping and go out to the car, and she gets in the passenger side. And she wouldn't get out! I was really almost angry that she would even suggest I drive home all the way from Whole Foods when I'd had so little instruction actually behind the wheel. Never mind that I had almost crashed earlier that day. So she drove home. Except she stopped on RT 12 and insisted I drive home from there. "It's a straight line from here," she said. "C'mon, you can do that."
Apparently they don't understand. My parents don't seem to get that I have never driven before. I have had no instruction behind the wheel. And what comes as second nature to them is completely foreign and scary to me. It doesn't help that I have an aunt that won't drive. Part of me is paranoid of ending up like her, and part of me feels like this fear of driving is already inherent in my DNA. I don't trust myself behind the wheel, and I don't know what to do to remedy this.
Learning to drive simply isn't practical. Lame.
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| The Beijing OlympicsXanga has had wicked lame Featured Questions lately. Honestly, what rationale do they use to pick the Featured Question? Obviously none at all.
So the 2008 Summer Olympics is this August. Are you excited? You know, I vaguely remember reading an article two years ago, shortly before the Winter Olympics, about how the television rating for the Olympics were going down, down, down. And I thought to myself, that's lame. I love the Olympics! I've looked forward to them since I was old enough to know about them. The Olympics have been like vacation for us - I remember being allowed to take time out of school to watch the Olympics, time to stay up late to watch the Olympics, time to discuss the Olympics fervently with my sisters and friends. So yeah, I'm excited!
Or, I was excited. I've never been a huge fan of China, mostly because it get such negative press from the media, but you can't deny that China isn't exactly "the model nation." In regards to the Beijing Olympics, I was optimistic, though. China has such extremely rich heritage; I knew it would be interesting. I was so excited, in fact, that I decided to write about the 2008 Beijing Olympics for my composition class. And naturally the first place I turned to for research was CNN. Yeah, I know. And what the search engine produces is an article about the people who have been displaced from their homes to make room for the Olympics Village.
Hold the phone? I was stunned. The pieces of the puzzle fell together for me. I was vaguely aware of what was going on with China politically - their involvement in Mayanmar and Darfur, as well as human rights' and workers' conditions. But the news this article informed me of was unpalatable. I did a little more research, and the more I learned, the more disenchanted I became with the Beijing Olympics.
Many argue that an Olympics in Beijing would further open up the nation to democratic ideals. Yeah, just like free trade advocates argue that free trade would open China up to democratic ideals. See how that's going?
Think back to the last time a communist nation hosted the Olympics. Yeah, USSR. They were determined to prove themselves through the competition, and would stop at nothing to do so. The Games were a sham! There was blatant rule breaking by the USSR, and it was a Games that left a bad taste in everyone's mouths. And the time before that? Yeah, Germany. Commonly called Hitler's Olypmics. Also a regime trying to prove itself, only this time through racial slurs. There were no Jews on Germany's team. This Games, too, was a disaster. And people expect the Beijing Olympics to be different?
I know better than most that the spirit of the Olympics is friendly competition between nations, a way to bring countries together. And I want to believe that spirit will be preserved in the Beijing Olympics, but history tells us otherwise. Besides, why would the United States want to be a part of a Games that is so marked by blatant barreling over the rights of life and property? I wish with all my heart that the United States would boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but there's no hope left for that.
Enjoy the Games! | | |
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