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We say we want to make a difference in the world, but what are we willing to pay to make that difference?
Oftentimes, we look at change as a barrier. We have always believed that the things established in the past are always right – and will still remain right. Well, I guess it is normal for people to have tendencies in alternatives that perpetuate the so called status quo. Psychologists (from what I have learned in my Pscyh class) even call this state as a “comfort zone”, suggesting that breaking from the status quo is, for most people, emotionally uncomfortable. Perhaps because if things work out badly – or appear to be different from the usual – one can be accused of making the bad choice. Who wants to be blamed anyway? Who’s after for the burden and responsibility when things are perceived to be wrong anyway?
It is said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Margaret Campbell from the Freedom Writers, a senior teacher who teaches for 30 years in Wilson High School, acquires the same rationale. She is indeed a very good teacher, but the thing is, she is stuck in her own old ways. Basing from her past experiences as a teacher and as a head in one of the departments in Wilson High, she dissents Erin Gruwell’s efforts to give the volatile mix of African-American, Latino, Asian and white freshmen (who are classified by the school’s callous administration as “unteachables”) a chance to learn, a chance to change, and a chance to prove they really can. “You can’t make someone want an education!” Threatened by change, she only knows how to function within the existing system, believing that nothing – not even Erin – can spark any kind of transformation.
I won’t blame her for having such an adverse kind of thinking. At Long Beach, California, between the years 1992 to 1993, you can positively picture a segment of ‘90s American urban sprawl. Homicide rates soar; high school kids bus in from surrounding ghettos – where many expect to die in gang-related conflict before graduation. The kids involved are not delinquents, but teenagers fighting a war of the streets that began long before they were born. Raised up in an environment of poverty, unemployment, and violence that flourishes discrimination, they eventually get hold of their own beliefs; they acquired diverse mentality that oftentimes clashes. All these are due to their own record, own track of history.
“Nobody cares what I do. Why should I bother coming to school?” Most of these teens thought there’s nothing any better in store for them; that they are not fit to enter school and be the first in their families to graduate. They believed they are destined only to be soldiers, not of war, but of the streets. Gang violence, riots – name it, they do it. In fact, Eva – the young Latina – felt like their “kind” were always being judged especially by the whites. Because of her father’s imprisonment for a crime the latter has not committed, she was led to hate everybody else, she was led to take revenge whatever happens. Once she said, “I don't even know how this war started. It's just two sides that tripped each other way back. Who cares about the history behind it? I am my father's daughter, and when they call me to testify, I will protect my own, no matter what.” Notice how the past manages to play a major role in shaping a person’s outlook in life. Even if an idea is against one person’s will, that won’t count – for all that matters now is the past. Why bother disrupt a tradition – a tradition that seems to have worked well in the past?
What’s even worse, Eva is not the only person to go through the same dilemma; a bunch of them do. Their minds are set to fight for their own America. Their minds are set to deny change for they think it will further mess up the status quo.
History – as we all know it – can either free us or bind us, can either be a barrier or an opportunity. It may be hard to evade the tension between history (memory) and change (innovation). It’s like finding balance between honoring history and promoting change. In fact, our world can be change-oriented, but there is definitely a hesitance (that we can’t totally eradicate) to change anything that feels like it might not be keeping with tradition.
But, who the hell says we can never change for the sake of our history? Yes it’s true, that history suggests what and how things can be in the future. But the ways of the history will never be enough as an indication of what and how things must be in the time to come. Robert Kennedy once said, "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written in the history of this generation." We cannot change our history, nor should we want to. But that does not end everything! We can actually learn from it, grow from it and become better because of it.
In the movie, Erin Gruwell – a courageous teacher who defied the odds and represented change – then uttered, “Every voice that told you ‘you can’t’ is silenced. Every reason that tells you ‘things will never change’ disappears. And the person you were before this moment, that person’s turn is over.” Unlike other more experienced teachers, she took the risk and abandoned conventional and straight-laced methods of teaching. She, through her naïve optimism, stands up for the adage “if you want change, then you must be that change”. Her character is so inspiring that even her students, the “unteachables”, get a hold of it too. They learned to pick up a pen instead of a gun; they realized their lives matter, and that they – despite their pasts – really “got something to say to people”. These kids chose to make a change in their lives and to break the pattern of history, for history is not something to keep us the same, it is a proving ground for the greatest challenges and accomplishments of the future.
Now the question is, what makes them change? Ideas. Strange as it seems, simple ideas caused them to alter their attitude towards life. According to the Oxford dictionary, an idea is any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity. It can also be called as a thought or a notion. But however one defines it, an idea, a notion, a thought – these things are actually the same things that make the world go round. For centuries a person has thought it, spoken it. And if the idea were strong enough, one might even act upon it. What corrodes the minds of our generation is the thinking that a belief is simply a belief, and one has to look no further beyond it.
Sometimes, most of us also think we are not good or important enough to make a difference in the world. And that thinking causes us to choose idleness instead of willingness. Even in simple matters such as ‘It’s too little to pick up that piece of trash in the grass’ or ‘I am too intelligent to associate with this type of person’. Don’t you think it’s a little too self-centered? The little difference we make or not make each day, in our lives and in the lives of others, may not appear as much if anything at all. But, why don’t we pay attention to all of those stories about the smallest amount, smallest person, making the big difference at the end?
In the movie, Erin Gruwell used and introduced the accounts of two girls their own age, Anne Frank and the modern-day-Anne-Frank, Zlata Filpovic (although removed from the movie). These are stories of simple people with powerful ideas that led each of Gruwell’s kids to undergo a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries, believing that “the book will be something to read behind and say ‘we were here’”. Each of us has our own story, and through our stories, we can help establish that difference; we can help change the world small or even big time. “We are all ordinary people…even the ordinary people can, within their own small ways, turn on a light in a dark room.”
An incredibly good friend of mine once told me this, “A goal without an action plan is only a daydream”. I realized, we are the architects of our own achievements, and far too often we underestimate our own ability, our own impact. But hey, the truth is that we – no matter how small we think of ourselves – are still part of a bigger picture. What we do, and what we don’t do, matters! We don’t have to have a grandiose and a radical idea to change the world. Just having an idea of who we really want to be, and acting in order to become that person, can be of equal worth and merit as taking over, or perhaps saving the world. We have to be active in shaping our future because apathy leads to idleness. And that idleness would be the enemy of our progress and the crusher of our ideas.
The world, the people in it, and the societal laws that bind us today, were all set in motion by a few people with a few ideas. We can take it back and set it on a new course, only if we are willing to put forth the effort, take up the discipline and move with conviction. There are only two things that ideas can amount to or become, that is: goals that we take into action or that we allow to fade away into daydreams. Action or not, the course of the world can change based on a single idea, whether it be one that has been fulfilled or withheld from the world. It’s up to us, the owners and origins of such thoughts, notions and ideas. Because who knows? Maybe, like electricity, like a light bulb, that one idea we learned from our history could illuminate the world for centuries to follow. Because time and time again, history tells us that one thing will be, and always has been, true: one idea can still change the world, and that can spur us on to greater achievement and better accomplishments.
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Hi18--Western History Class, Ateneo de Manila University
Whoo, got an A on this paper!
This Reflection Paper is Inspired by the Movie Freedom Writers
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