Mission Statement
This group aims to focus on uniting people and encouraging them to support each other through life. We will actively encourage members to share their stories and talk to each other to make new friends, we will discuss important issues that may affect our members and we will accept all artworks that deal with an emotional issue. This is not limited to mental health issues, and the group is open to anyone.
Our hearts are heavy burdens we shouldn't have to bear alone - Go Radio "Goodnight Moon"
Links
WELCOME!
Winners
and the results are finally in! Thanks to everyone who entered this competition was hard work to run and judge but totally worth it to hear people talking passionately about things they care about! The winners are...
In the GLOBAL category...
FIRST PLACE
Synesthi's speech
The Danger of Untold StoriesI believe in words. I believe in voices, the unique cries of human beings as they pour their soul out into the sky. But most of all, I believe in stories.
Stories, be they written or spoken or painted onto the walls of caves, reaffirm our humanity. They give us back our own heartbeat, that dull pulse of blood, but more than that they give us our minds. They let us reach back and see where we’ve been, what we felt, what we believed. They form a mirror, let us see who we are, who we were.
And I believe that everyone has a story that deserves to be heard. But more and more I’m seeing that only some stories get told. You have books for children fully admitting that people have different bodies…but where is the admission of different minds? Why do no main characters have mental illness, or attention deficit, autism or dyslexia? Where are the movies about synesthetes, those with OCD, those battling depression?
This is not just a problem of children’s literature, it e
SECOND PLACE
Pepper-the-phoenix's speech
This is not an Answer, it is a QuestionOver 100,000 Syrians dead. 400,000 Darfuris dead. 1 million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks dead. 6 million Jews and 5 million Eastern Europeans, gays, and other dissident Germans dead. 2 million Cambodians dead. 96,000 Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians dead. 1 million Tutsis dead.
Enough.
Stalin once said, “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Why do we insist on proving Stalin right? The numbers above bring nothing but numbness and maybe a hint of shock. There is no worldwide outrage. There is no serious effort to stop these massacres. Sure people gasp and shake their heads when they read the headlines about the Syrian Civil War and the UN puffs its feathers and shakes its finger at Assad, but his actions will simply be another ignored black stain on the pages of history. As Hitler once said, in an attempt to justify his own actions, “Who, after all, speaks today of the Armenians?”
A sign in the Holocaust museum reads,
THIRD PLACE
DamonWakes' speech
A Golden OpportunityListen to this speech here: https://soundcloud.com/damon-wakes/a-golden-opportunity
This is not a topic that affects me personally. Neither is it a topic for the world. The people who this topic affects the most will never hear it. They are struggling just to survive, just to feed themselves, just to save their children’s sight.
Approximately one million children die of Vitamin A deficiency each year. Approximately half a million more are left blinded. Imagine if there were some amazing new technology that would solve this extremely common, extremely serious problem almost overnight. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Now imagine that this technology is not new. Imagine that it’s been available since 1999, and it’s never been used.
This technology is not a gadget. It’s not a machine. It’s not a tool. It is a living organism. A genetically modified organism. Now, what do those words bring to mind? A mouse with a human ear sprouting from its back? Some
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
(no prize)
camelopardalisinblue's speech
Pregnancy and Infant Loss AwarenessImagine this: as a happily married woman in your 20s, you feel ready to start building your family. Together, you and your partner do all the prerequisites -- pregnancy vitamins and converting to a healthier lifestyle, etc. Finally, the day arrives when you discover that you're pregnant. You and your partner are delighted... but 7 weeks from now, something goes wrong.
The baby you've carried, the one you've made hopes and dreams around, has died. Every day, people around the world experience this grief -- and yes, men, too, grieve after a miscarriage -- and mostly, couples grieve alone.
In 2011, research suggested that in England and Wales that year, ten babies were stillborn every day. Scotland's 2010 research says 1 stillbirth every second day... but 16 women suffered a miscarriage every day. In the US, roughly 15-20% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. A USAToday study suggests that, worldwide, more than 5000 babies are stillborn every day.
These numbers are staggering, especiall
91816119's speech
7,209,035,426.Earth. It is not made up of seven billion, two hundred and nine million, thirty five thousand, four hundred and twenty six different, individual humanoid fragments.
We, as a race, have very little, in fact, to do with the Earth. Our troubles and our triumphs, our loves and our losses – these do not represent the world, do not cause trees to grow, nor tides to flow, nor the aurora to wander like frozen breath across the Arctic Circle. We look at our world, and we see something pure, singular. A blue-green-white sphere, running its elliptical race around a fire-breathing star. But us? We are experience, feeling and life. We are living and dying. We are temporary.
It is our existence, our life, that is a mixed bag. We create good and bad, but we also destroy them both. Wind, however, is neither created nor destroyed: only changed or reused. The same can be said of the waves, of dandelions. Our mission on this planet, then – for we must have a purpose – is not to dwell on
Beyond-An-Anomaly's speech
Education: Live It, Learn ItAnyone remember when you had to spend ninety minutes in a classroom watching your teacher write with chalk against the not-Smartboard, type reports with a typewriter and actually, like, you know, go to the library and pick up some encyclopedias if you had to do research for a project?
Really? Because I don't.
And chances are, a fair amount of you don't either.
The means of learning have indeed changed. You now have the World Wide Web at your disposal, Microsoft Word is eternally at your service, and really, when was the last time you went to A library to get one of those...what do they call it? Oh yeah. Books.
But the purpose of it has not changed. In a pretty fair majority of the world, you have to have at least some form of educational experience for the sake of your profession, whatever it may be.
School was made to teach children, teens, and young adults how to grow and develop in a forever changing society where technology and elaborate thinking has crowned itself king. It teaches
In the PERSONAL category...
FIRST PLACE
Sammur-amat's speech
Anxiety and SerenityDear Friend,
You- yes you, the person reading and listening to this speech right now. If you're here because you know of this competition, then you must surely be either part of the group, Burdened Hearts or be familiar with what the aforementioned group stands for. Being a sufferer of a plethora of problems myself- brought about by Generalized Anxiety Disorder- I am no stranger to the feeling that, "our hearts are heavy burdens we shouldn't have to bear alone."
I cannot even begin to stress into letters all the unsaid and lost words, the vertigo and the cold sweating, the unreasonable panic attacks and self-destructive rampages every cell in my body begs me to get into at times- over the silliest and most fictitious of hurt words- words that I should never let crush my already chipped, porcelain-pale spirit.
My oh my though, what an amazing, amazing, amazing feeling it is to know, to really know, that you are not alone. What rapture to know that your simple words and well-wishes for o
SECOND PLACE
camelopardalisinblue's speech
I Am More Than BPDDon't tell me you know me better
than the people who've known me
for years. I know me too, and I know
to trust them with my sanity.
Don't tell me I don't need the hospital--
I wouldn't be here
if I didn't need the hospital. This is not
a playground and I am not
stupid. My emotional appendix
has burst and reality
tastes of copper; don't tell me
this is just
attention seeking.
All requests for help
involve seeking attention.
The patient whose leg is broken
screams for pain killers
but I am only kneeling
and asking you to help me
stay alive.
Don't tell me I am being irrational
when you are basing this
on a label only.
I am capable of great rationality:
I can begin by debating this
without calling you an asshole.
Flip the table -- call the burn victim
irrational, and I think you'll find
more volativity.
Listen when my supporters tell you
that I am sunshine
poured over candy
-- they are telling you
this is not me. Hear us:
I am bubbled laughter,
naivety and gentleness--
I do art and beauty
THIRD PLACE
bittersweetflames' speech
The Starving ArtistThere are many words to describe art but often they go hand in hand with an image of the artist ensconced in their dark tower and bleeding for their craft. I know this because I grew up with that image burnt into my brain by the very people I relied on for guidance. I was led to believe that following a life of art, wasn’t what smart people did, so I went to university and got myself a business degree. I worked hard and sweated towards goals that were the ones I believed were worth working for. What they didn’t know and, back then, what I didn’t understand was that with every course load I successfully passed and every thesis I bravely defended, I killed a small part of myself. With much pain to my inner self, I curtailed every artistic instinct and stopped every need to express rather than rationalize. Now I can only look back at all my words that went unwritten and all my pictures that went unmade and mourn.
This year, I celebrate having lived for quarter of a centu
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
(no prize)
MagicalJoey's speech
What is a critique?Ladies and gentlemen of DeviantArt, I pose two questions to you: who is allowed to critique and what exactly is a critique?
To answer the second question first, a critique is a constructive comment. In it you place your thoughts and opinions on the other persons' work, remembering that what you are saying is just that; your personal opinion. You don't know everything, nobody does. Your grammar and the like is not flawless, nobodies' is. In fact, as humans we are all fallible. A critique is where you try to help people with their writing, or any other form of art, to the best of your ability.
Answering the second question, everyone is allowed to critique. You don't have to have a degree, you don't need to be a professor or have a doctorate in English. You just have to have an opinion and the willingness to help people.
GrammarNaziCritiques is a group that encourages such things. We have a group of critics who are all normal deviants such as yourselves. The only difference is that they
MamaLantiis' speech
DailyBreadCafe's speech
Many many thanks to the amazing judges,
for their time <33 It was hard to pick the winners, we all had different favourites I think, so well done EVERYONE who participated. To be clear judgement was done by totalling points scored by individual judges and judges were not allowed to give their own piece (if they entered) any points so no judge voted for their own pieces.All prizes with a
have been sent out already to their winners via my account. <3Global Speech Prizes
1st Place1000 points donated by TheGalleryOfEve
1000 points donated by PoetryOD
500 points donated by spoems
170 points donated by LadyLincoln
150 points donated by GinkgoWerkstatt
100 points donated by various donators at BurdenedHeartsAdmin
100 points donated by ikazon
50 points donated by Memnalar
50 points donated by neurotype-on-discord
50 points donated by LionesseRampant
50 points donated by GuinevereToGwen
25 points donated by Rose-Rayne
25 points donated by Aerode
Critique on the piece of your choice from Gingersanps, glossolalias, 0hgravity, DailyBreadCafe and WorldWar-Tori
Journal features from BurdenedHearts, MagicalJoey, MotleyDreams, camelopardalisinblue, HugQueen, SheDares, FuzzyHoser, Lintu47, A-Lovely-Anxiety, vespera, dreamsinstatic, DailyBreadCafe, 0hgravity, miontre, rainylake, Astrikos and SimplySilent
Llamas from MagicalJoey, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
1 pixel portrait from mirz333
A digital sketch request from Astrikos
Poll feature from PizzaPotatoNBacon
2nd Place500 points donated by TheGalleryOfEve
500 points donated by PoetryOD
100 points donated by GinkgoWerkstatt
100 points donated by spoems
100 points donated by various donators at BurdenedHeartsAdmin
100 points donated by ikazon
80 points donated by LadyLincoln
50 points donated by GuinevereToGwen
50 points donated by LionesseRampant
50 points donated by neurotype-on-discord
50 points donated by Memnalar
25 points donated by Rose-Rayne
Critique on the piece of your choice from Gingersanps, glossolalias, 0hgravity, DailyBreadCafe and WorldWar-Tori
Journal features from BurdenedHearts, MagicalJoey, MotleyDreams, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe, HugQueen, SheDares, FuzzyHoser, Lintu47, A-Lovely-Anxiety, vespera, dreamsinstatic, 0hgravity, miontre, rainylake and SimplySilent
Llamas from MagicalJoey, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
1 custom stamp from mirz333
Poll feature from PizzaPotatoNBacon
3rd Place250 points donated by TheGalleryOfEve
250 points donated by PoetryOD
100 points donated by various donators at BurdenedHeartsAdmin
100 points donated by ikazon
50 points donated by spoems
50 points donated by LionesseRampant
50 points donated by GuinevereToGwen
50 points donated by GinkgoWerkstatt
50 points donated by Memnalar
50 points donated by neurotype-on-discord
25 points donated by Rose-Rayne
1 custom emoticon sign from mirz333
Poll feature from PizzaPotatoNBacon
Critique on the piece of your choice from Gingersanps, glossolalias, 0hgravity, DailyBreadCafe and WorldWar-Tori
Journal features from BurdenedHearts, MagicalJoey, MotleyDreams, camelopardalisinblue, HugQueen, SheDares, FuzzyHoser, Lintu47, A-Lovely-Anxiety, vespera, dreamsinstatic, 0hgravity, miontre, rainylake, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
Llamas from MagicalJoey, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
Personal Speech Prizes
1st Place1000 points donated by TheGalleryOfEve
1000 points donated by PoetryOD
500 points donated by spoems
170 points donated by LadyLincoln
150 points donated by GinkgoWerkstatt
100 points donated by various donators at BurdenedHeartsAdmin
100 points donated by ikazon
50 points donated by Memnalar
50 points donated by neurotype-on-discord
50 points donated by LionesseRampant
50 points donated by GuinevereToGwen
25 points donated by Rose-Rayne
25 points donated by Aerode
3 month premium membership from miontre
3 month premium membership from scarletwave
1 pixel portrait from mirz333
Poll feature from PizzaPotatoNBacon
Critique on the piece of your choice from Gingersanps, glossolalias, 0hgravity, DailyBreadCafe and WorldWar-Tori
Journal features from BurdenedHearts, MagicalJoey, MotleyDreams, camelopardalisinblue, HugQueen, SheDares, FuzzyHoser, Lintu47, miontre, A-Lovely-Anxiety, vespera, dreamsinstatic, DailyBreadCafe, 0hgravity, rainylake, SimplySilent
Llamas from MagicalJoey, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
2nd Place500 points donated by TheGalleryOfEve
500 points donated by PoetryOD
100 points donated by GinkgoWerkstatt
100 points donated by spoems
100 points donated by various donators at BurdenedHeartsAdmin
100 points donated by ikazon
80 points donated by LadyLincoln
50 points donated by GuinevereToGwen
50 points donated by neurotype-on-discord
50 points donated by Memnalar
50 points donated by LionesseRampant
25 points donated by Rose-Rayne
1 custom stamp from mirz333
Poll feature from PizzaPotatoNBacon
Critique on the piece of your choice from Gingersanps, glossolalias, 0hgravity, DailyBreadCafe and WorldWar-Tori
Journal features from BurdenedHearts, MagicalJoey, MotleyDreams, camelopardalisinblue, HugQueen, SheDares, FuzzyHoser, Lintu47, A-Lovely-Anxiety, vespera, dreamsinstatic, DailyBreadCafe, miontre, 0hgravity, rainylake and SimplySilent
Llamas from MagicalJoey, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
3rd Place250 points donated by TheGalleryOfEve
250 points donated by PoetryOD
100 points donated by various donators at BurdenedHeartsAdmin
100 points donated by ikazon
50 points donated by neurotype-on-discord
50 points donated by LionesseRampant
50 points donated by GinkgoWerkstatt
50 points donated by spoems
50 points donated by GuinevereToGwen
50 points donated by Memnalar
25 points donated by Rose-Rayne
1 custom emoticon sign from mirz333
Poll feature from PizzaPotatoNBacon
Critique on the piece of your choice from Gingersanps, glossolalias, 0hgravity, DailyBreadCafe and WorldWar-Tori
Journal features from BurdenedHearts, MagicalJoey, MotleyDreams, camelopardalisinblue, HugQueen, SheDares, FuzzyHoser, Lintu47, A-Lovely-Anxiety, vespera, dreamsinstatic, DailyBreadCafe, miontre, 0hgravity, rainylake and SimplySilent
Llamas from MagicalJoey, camelopardalisinblue, DailyBreadCafe and SimplySilent
Entries
:thumb424461220: Listen here *
:thumb407503625: :thumb426180342: :thumb426715797:![]()
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:thumb407503625: :thumb426180342: :thumb426715797:
I Am More Than BPDDon't tell me you know me better
than the people who've known me
for years. I know me too, and I know
to trust them with my sanity.
Don't tell me I don't need the hospital--
I wouldn't be here
if I didn't need the hospital. This is not
a playground and I am not
stupid. My emotional appendix
has burst and reality
tastes of copper; don't tell me
this is just
attention seeking.
All requests for help
involve seeking attention.
The patient whose leg is broken
screams for pain killers
but I am only kneeling
and asking you to help me
stay alive.
Don't tell me I am being irrational
when you are basing this
on a label only.
I am capable of great rationality:
I can begin by debating this
without calling you an asshole.
Flip the table -- call the burn victim
irrational, and I think you'll find
more volativity.
Listen when my supporters tell you
that I am sunshine
poured over candy
-- they are telling you
this is not me. Hear us:
I am bubbled laughter,
naivety and gentleness--
I do art and beauty
Pregnancy and Infant Loss AwarenessImagine this: as a happily married woman in your 20s, you feel ready to start building your family. Together, you and your partner do all the prerequisites -- pregnancy vitamins and converting to a healthier lifestyle, etc. Finally, the day arrives when you discover that you're pregnant. You and your partner are delighted... but 7 weeks from now, something goes wrong.
The baby you've carried, the one you've made hopes and dreams around, has died. Every day, people around the world experience this grief -- and yes, men, too, grieve after a miscarriage -- and mostly, couples grieve alone.
In 2011, research suggested that in England and Wales that year, ten babies were stillborn every day. Scotland's 2010 research says 1 stillbirth every second day... but 16 women suffered a miscarriage every day. In the US, roughly 15-20% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. A USAToday study suggests that, worldwide, more than 5000 babies are stillborn every day.
These numbers are staggering, especiall
The Danger of Untold StoriesI believe in words. I believe in voices, the unique cries of human beings as they pour their soul out into the sky. But most of all, I believe in stories.:thumb427759068:
Stories, be they written or spoken or painted onto the walls of caves, reaffirm our humanity. They give us back our own heartbeat, that dull pulse of blood, but more than that they give us our minds. They let us reach back and see where we’ve been, what we felt, what we believed. They form a mirror, let us see who we are, who we were.
And I believe that everyone has a story that deserves to be heard. But more and more I’m seeing that only some stories get told. You have books for children fully admitting that people have different bodies…but where is the admission of different minds? Why do no main characters have mental illness, or attention deficit, autism or dyslexia? Where are the movies about synesthetes, those with OCD, those battling depression?
This is not just a problem of children’s literature, it e
War: The Death of us allThere is no such thing as an art of war. All it is is the bloody death of thousands, ever millions. The reason for most wars? A difference in ideas. I’m not saying that all everyone has to have the same ideas as everyone else, but you don’t have to go around killing their people because of it.
We may all be different, but we’re all the same in many ways too. We all love, we all have hearts. So why don’t we love instead of fight. If we all put down our guns and picked up tools instead, not only would fewer people die, but we could end world hunger, save the Earth, even cure cancer. So when will we end it all for the good of humanity? When will we end the fight?
You're not meNo matter what you do to me, no matter what you tell me, you cannot change who I am. I won’t change to fit your unreachable standards for beautiful. I may not be perfect, but when have you ever been? You can call be a freak all you want, but it won’t make the smallest difference. You may think you’re better than me, but unlike you, I don’t conform to fit the world’s description of me. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I have to wear ten pounds of makeup, and have a beautiful body. Nor does it mean I don’t have an opinion.:thumb428560677: :thumb428660774:
You can’t change me into your perfect image of me. I’m not you, and you’re not me. Don’t try to change who I am until you change who you are.
What is a critique?Ladies and gentlemen of DeviantArt, I pose two questions to you: who is allowed to critique and what exactly is a critique?
To answer the second question first, a critique is a constructive comment. In it you place your thoughts and opinions on the other persons' work, remembering that what you are saying is just that; your personal opinion. You don't know everything, nobody does. Your grammar and the like is not flawless, nobodies' is. In fact, as humans we are all fallible. A critique is where you try to help people with their writing, or any other form of art, to the best of your ability.
Answering the second question, everyone is allowed to critique. You don't have to have a degree, you don't need to be a professor or have a doctorate in English. You just have to have an opinion and the willingness to help people.
GrammarNaziCritiques is a group that encourages such things. We have a group of critics who are all normal deviants such as yourselves. The only difference is that they
7,209,035,426.Earth. It is not made up of seven billion, two hundred and nine million, thirty five thousand, four hundred and twenty six different, individual humanoid fragments.
We, as a race, have very little, in fact, to do with the Earth. Our troubles and our triumphs, our loves and our losses – these do not represent the world, do not cause trees to grow, nor tides to flow, nor the aurora to wander like frozen breath across the Arctic Circle. We look at our world, and we see something pure, singular. A blue-green-white sphere, running its elliptical race around a fire-breathing star. But us? We are experience, feeling and life. We are living and dying. We are temporary.
It is our existence, our life, that is a mixed bag. We create good and bad, but we also destroy them both. Wind, however, is neither created nor destroyed: only changed or reused. The same can be said of the waves, of dandelions. Our mission on this planet, then – for we must have a purpose – is not to dwell on
This is not an Answer, it is a QuestionOver 100,000 Syrians dead. 400,000 Darfuris dead. 1 million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks dead. 6 million Jews and 5 million Eastern Europeans, gays, and other dissident Germans dead. 2 million Cambodians dead. 96,000 Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians dead. 1 million Tutsis dead.
Enough.
Stalin once said, “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Why do we insist on proving Stalin right? The numbers above bring nothing but numbness and maybe a hint of shock. There is no worldwide outrage. There is no serious effort to stop these massacres. Sure people gasp and shake their heads when they read the headlines about the Syrian Civil War and the UN puffs its feathers and shakes its finger at Assad, but his actions will simply be another ignored black stain on the pages of history. As Hitler once said, in an attempt to justify his own actions, “Who, after all, speaks today of the Armenians?”
A sign in the Holocaust museum reads,
The Grey areas.All of Humanity wants to see our world in one of two constants. The natures of these constants tend to fluctuate from the ambiguous "Good and Evil" to the steadfast "Black and White". The problem is that these constants are not standalone facts; rather they exist as wildly fluctuating variables influenced by a wide diversity of opinions.
When these opinions are taken and tallied you find that while most will overlap in places an equal or greater amount will coalesce in grey areas of sociological mores..
Grey areas as a whole, exist solely because of the dualistic nature of our psyche and sociological paradigms. Everything should and can be divided into a set of two; Guilty, Innocent, Right, Wrong, Light, Dark. I could honestly continue forever, but of course that isn't the point.
What do you think when you see someone carrying a gun? Or see two men kissing? What about seeing a teenage male walk into a girls locker room because he feels "Feminine" today?
These are some of societies curr
Anxiety and SerenityDear Friend,:thumb430720447:
You- yes you, the person reading and listening to this speech right now. If you're here because you know of this competition, then you must surely be either part of the group, Burdened Hearts or be familiar with what the aforementioned group stands for. Being a sufferer of a plethora of problems myself- brought about by Generalized Anxiety Disorder- I am no stranger to the feeling that, "our hearts are heavy burdens we shouldn't have to bear alone."
I cannot even begin to stress into letters all the unsaid and lost words, the vertigo and the cold sweating, the unreasonable panic attacks and self-destructive rampages every cell in my body begs me to get into at times- over the silliest and most fictitious of hurt words- words that I should never let crush my already chipped, porcelain-pale spirit.
My oh my though, what an amazing, amazing, amazing feeling it is to know, to really know, that you are not alone. What rapture to know that your simple words and well-wishes for o
120 seconds...If you had 120 seconds to speak to the world, what would you say? Would you talk about the problems of the children in Africa? Maybe the shrinking economy of the world? Or even global warming? I would talk about relationships. I would speak of a world that bullies others for being different. I would speak about a world where brothers kill each other for worshiping another god. I would speak of a world that begrudges others based on the color of their skin and the way they talk. I would speak about a world that says they don’t do these things…
I would remind them of the wars started in the name of religion. I would remind them of the countries that bully their own people for disagreeing with them. I would remind them that we still hold prejudice over those we see as “lesser” beings. I would remind them of the damage rendered over years and years of bullying; both political and personal. I would remind them of what we have done…
I would give personal exper
A Golden OpportunityListen to this speech here: https://soundcloud.com/damon-wakes/a-golden-opportunity:thumb430161946: :thumb429856503: :thumb429255188:
This is not a topic that affects me personally. Neither is it a topic for the world. The people who this topic affects the most will never hear it. They are struggling just to survive, just to feed themselves, just to save their children’s sight.
Approximately one million children die of Vitamin A deficiency each year. Approximately half a million more are left blinded. Imagine if there were some amazing new technology that would solve this extremely common, extremely serious problem almost overnight. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Now imagine that this technology is not new. Imagine that it’s been available since 1999, and it’s never been used.
This technology is not a gadget. It’s not a machine. It’s not a tool. It is a living organism. A genetically modified organism. Now, what do those words bring to mind? A mouse with a human ear sprouting from its back? Some
Education: Live It, Learn ItAnyone remember when you had to spend ninety minutes in a classroom watching your teacher write with chalk against the not-Smartboard, type reports with a typewriter and actually, like, you know, go to the library and pick up some encyclopedias if you had to do research for a project?
Really? Because I don't.
And chances are, a fair amount of you don't either.
The means of learning have indeed changed. You now have the World Wide Web at your disposal, Microsoft Word is eternally at your service, and really, when was the last time you went to A library to get one of those...what do they call it? Oh yeah. Books.
But the purpose of it has not changed. In a pretty fair majority of the world, you have to have at least some form of educational experience for the sake of your profession, whatever it may be.
School was made to teach children, teens, and young adults how to grow and develop in a forever changing society where technology and elaborate thinking has crowned itself king. It teaches
The Starving ArtistThere are many words to describe art but often they go hand in hand with an image of the artist ensconced in their dark tower and bleeding for their craft. I know this because I grew up with that image burnt into my brain by the very people I relied on for guidance. I was led to believe that following a life of art, wasn’t what smart people did, so I went to university and got myself a business degree. I worked hard and sweated towards goals that were the ones I believed were worth working for. What they didn’t know and, back then, what I didn’t understand was that with every course load I successfully passed and every thesis I bravely defended, I killed a small part of myself. With much pain to my inner self, I curtailed every artistic instinct and stopped every need to express rather than rationalize. Now I can only look back at all my words that went unwritten and all my pictures that went unmade and mourn.:thumb430566369: :thumb429849765:
This year, I celebrate having lived for quarter of a centu
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