A Dreamer's Dreams Unfulfilled Just Yet.

When I was a child, I naively felt that as I grew older and became a man, all things negative would vanish and the world would simply be at my doorstep WAITING for me to change it. I thought all it took to change the society I grew up in were simple speeches and well wishes, and all would be fine.

It was my naivete that kept me from the realities of this world; it won't change off of well wishes and speeches. Societies and communities don't transform because we merely want them to, they transform because we force it to through action, through collective effort and through self-transformations within ourselves.

How can I as just one man expect to win over hearts and change the minds of others if I cannot do this within myself?

I've realized that in order to change the mentality of one community, you've got to change the mentalities of the families within that one community. However, I can't promote health if I can't take my own advice. I can't promote education if I do not engage in education myself. I can't advocate on behalf of the homeless and ask others to feed the homeless if I have never done so myself. In all acts of community advancement I call for, I now realize that the best advocacy in the world is advocacy that is demonstrated by example.

What are my words without actions to follow them?

What are my goals without efforts to achieve them?

What are my dreams without waking up to live them?

Words, without action, mean nothing.



Here's to us changing the world through example; one day at a time.

- David

Where Are We Headed As A Community?

Lately, the news and media has given us less and less reason to have faith in our sense of community and identity. Matters such as the debt ceiling, our trade deficit, our unemployment rates, our decline in educational advantages, three wars being waged and increase in prices on EVERYTHING (most notably Gas) has our community feeling overwhelmed. We struggle to get by everyday and since so many people are living check to check and day by day, we have a hard time believing we can make not only ourselves better as individuals, but even more difficult, ourselves better as a community. Now I'm not going to have you sit here and read a to-do list I made for our world; I simply want to know what YOU believe as an individual our community needs, lacks, and has too much of.

Trying to get the talking started,

David.

Our Nation's Priorities

When we look all around ourselves in this country, we see groups of people and communities that we don't always belong to. That's the beauty of diversity. When we read and hear certain opinions of different people, we sometimes feel that we can never agree with the ideas they value. When we look to our friends, we wonder why they act the way they do and say things they do. That's the one thing about our society that makes it so unique; we have groups of people from all avenues of life, all levels of education and backgrounds. We are in the struggle of finding ourselves. We know who we are as individuals, we know who we are as racial groups... but do we know who we are as a people? One might say, "We're Americans". While that might be true, the struggle in our quest for a universal identity is that we have in our minds this idea that the label 'American' means one entity; we're not one single entity and we're not one united people with one uniform set of values and principles. To some, family is the overlying number one valuable thing in their lives; to others, it might be their educations or their careers. Each of these things encompasses its own set of things to maintain and with different people holding different priorities, there is much to be debated over. A $1,000,000 dollar grant to a poor rural town is not at the first thing many people think about. Likewise, violence in the urban communities isn't something many people would initially want to address head on. These issues which affect the most isolated groups of people are the ones which aren't thoroughly discussed in all areas of the nation. We seldomly read or hear the stories about the other side's struggle. In our country, we give too much power to the phrase 'Out of sight, out of mind'. We know that which we can see and that with which we're familiar. Who you know that starved today in America? Who do you know that got evicted today? in America? Who have you talked to today that has more than enough intelligence to succeed in college but can't because they can't afford it? These are injustices to those in society. Anytime you succeed, anytime you do well, anytime you achieve an aspiration; know that there is always someone who less fortunate than yourself. What if it was you?