Serendipity

At the beginning of the semester, when we were defining social justice, we said it includes basic human needs such as access to basic healthcare.  Recently, annulling the Affordable Care Act has been a huge topic in the news.  Why is it such a concern? Why is healthcare necessary?   Hopefully, the following article will help illustrate it for you: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/feb/05/life-without-health-insurance-why-we-need-to-protect-the-most-vulnerable We will now watch this video to get an even more personal story; keep in mind that this is government created content: https://www.healthcare.gov/blog/jaime-s-story-life-without-health-insurance/ Extra article in case you are interested:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/health-care-is-a-right-no_b_11770518.html   So what is the Affordable Care Act?: https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/affordable-care-act/ https://www...

Yesterday, while we were discussing the article and video about the man who kept an open garden in his community there was talk about his view of change. He said instead of marching and petitioning, you can simply start change in your own life and community instead.  To me both the grassroots movements as well as more top-down approaches to making change are good, but often, they work best in tandem. But I digress. What came to mind when were discussing is that people usually believe what they doing is best. It’s natural human tendency, and it’s difficult to expand your horizons. Thus this thought led to when we watched “A Place at the Table”, when the government officials increased funding for school lunches. They had this whole press conference with smiling children and cartoon pieces of food with faces, not realizing that they were barely making a change and only increasing the budget for a school lunch by a few cents.  I talked about this a bit in my last blog pos...

As you all know, today is Inauguration day. It’s been looming in the back of my mind since November, and today it hit me like a splash of cold water in my face. So long Obama. So long to the ignorance I once had about the extremely polarized state of our governing system.  Upon reflection, after this past election, I think my knowledge and interest in the world has actually grown and I wonder if this would have happened had Hillary Clinton been elected. But now’s not a time to look back, progress can only be made when you move forward and focus on now; in the words of Ne-Yo, “It's not about what you've done/It's about what you doing.”  So that begs the question, what can I do about the issues I care about? How do I help make change?  By now, I’m sure you know that I’m very passionate about helping increase funding for Pediatric Cancer research since it is so underfunded and there’s so much need for new treatments. I’ve tried a lot of stuff, fundraising, havin...