Social Awareness Week 2-Two more things off of the list.

Analyze Social Problems In IRP.
Well, currently I'm not really reading a book with outlying social injustices.
So I'm going to go back to "Story Of A Girl", which I read in about a day a little while ago.

Story Of A Girl is a novel by Sara Zarr, about how the life of a small-town girl is completely turned around  when she is caught having sex with a high school junior-at thirteen.  For the rest of her high school life, everyone thinks of her as the school slut, because nobody forgets these things in small towns.  Or anywhere, really.

Some of the issues in this book just deal with how unfair society is:  How we are all programmed to believe in certain things, and we can't break this programming; how people are never really forgiven; the ways we label people; and what we'll do merely to do something.

In the town the character, Deanna, lives in, there really isn't anything to do.  And so she does what teenagers are supposed to do in small towns when they have nothing better to do-get drunk, high, have sex and be stupid.And she gets a reputation for being a slut that no matter what, she can't rub off.  I am so happy to live in New York where there are actual things to do with my time.

Another issue in the class system in our country. Deanna has it tough because she lives in the less wealthy section of her town.  And just because she doesn't have a family with income, it basically prevents her from leading a healthy life.  Her parents are never home, she does no extracurriculars, her brother Darren and his girlfriend live in her parent's basement.  Their the typical "white trash" family-- teenaged boy knocks up girlfriend, and they have no means of their own income because they're busy caring for the baby.

Deanna herself has no aspirations, she accepts the hardships of her life and she doesn't even try to run away from them.  She works in a Pizzeria, hoping to get enough money so she can rent an apartment with her brother when she turns 18. She doesn't even want to go to college.   It's truly upsetting that just being born from a family with low income assures you a bad life.  It really is sad.



A True Story About Someone Who Changes The World Every Day

The Dalai Lama is someone who changes the world every day.  In fact, it's hard to come up with a story on him just because it seems like every other day he is enlightening new people.
This isn't biased, I'm not talking about his buddhism speeches.  I'm not writing this because I'm a strong buddhist, in fact I have no religion.  But the Dalai Lama teaches  about peace, and how we can work to make our world peaceful.

The Dalai Lama won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, at the age of 59, and even now as he gets older he continues to fly around delivering his messages of peace to everyone.  After 9/11, he delivered a speech that many people took into mind.  He doesn't just fund causes to earn the name of a good person.  He really cares.   His speech on 9/11 was so moving that it made many people cry.  In it, he talked of how events of this kind of hatred "make it clear that if we allow our human intelligence to be guided and controlled by negative emotions like hatred, the consequences are disastrous." He analyzes our souls in ways that make it clear how truly brilliant he is.  (Okay, this is starting to sound really stupid.)

Also in his 9/11 speech, he gives americans guidelines for how to respond to an attack like this.  He doesn't just hate the people who committed the crime, he digs deeper into why the did what he did.  For more on his 9/11 speech: http://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/9-11
That speech is just one of the many he has delivered.