Tried Something New

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Beauty

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  How do you define beauty? Do you think that you really know what beauty is? Or do you let the daily barrage of what is fed to you through media define beauty for you?  Every culture tends to define it a little differently but textbook definition is that beauty generally is what is pleasing to the eye. That can vary from person to person. We should all know that true beauty goes beyond the skin's surface. Here is a good video called "The Evolution of Beauty". It shows how a woman is prepped for an ad campaign. I think it's very important for people to see especially young people who struggle with the whole notion that beauty should have a certain "look". Trying to model yourself up to images in the media can be a dangerous practice. Beauty comes in many forms. I like the video's message that every girl should feel beautiful. It's important to remember that not everything you see is truly as it appears.  My message is that beauty may b...
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Making a Way

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Talk about making something out of nothing!  At the age of 14 a young man from Malawi, Africa found scraps and built a windmill to generate power for his family home.  The windmill he built was able to power four lights and two radios. Then he wrote an award winning book called "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope " on how he was able to do this.  It's an inspiring story about the will of a young man who used his brains and what little resources around him to improve his family's living conditions. I think about how I hear so many people complain about what they don't have instead of appreciating what they DO have and utilizing the resources around them.  Take a look at William Kamkwamba's speech in the video below. Kamkwamba's success story got a lot of press resulting in many organizations offering to assist him with future projects including malaria prevention, a deep water well for clean water, solar...
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Reality

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Skyrocketing prices in goods and services, joblessness, political battles, wars, natural disasters.  Day by day we all go head-to-head with our own personal challenges big and small. These are trying times. But observing how the Japanese people have reacted in the aftermath of the recent earthquake and tsunami really made me sit up and take notice.  There has been little if any looting and no rioting.  People wait in orderly lines outside stores and gas stations. They see the workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant who are trying to keep the plant from melting down as doing their job not as heroes like we might because they are risking their lives.  I did a little research and found out that the difference between American and Japanese culture is that Japanese culture encourages cooperation and discourages self-interest. It is deeply ingrained in them from birth.  Americans value self-determination, individuality, independence, and a strong sens...
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