December 28, 2009

Here I sit, at my sister's apartment, trying to stay warm. It's an older building in a small town in Massachusetts, and like most older buildings, it hasn't been kept up too well. There's no real insulation in this building, the windows are leaky, the floors are getting a bit less sturdy, the electrical wiring is a bit on the weak side, and the heat is one small unit in the middle of one room. When it's windy, like it's getting tonight, the windows rattle because they aren't too tight anymore. My sister worries that a good gust will knock the windows out totally.

Even with all the problems, it's a roof over my head right now. There are so many people who don't have that roof right now. So many who don't have the ability to eat a good meal or get warm at all, or sleep safely without worrying about what they're going to lose if they sleep deeply. It's a crying shame.

This country that I love is such an apathetic mess. Let me say that again. The United States of America is an apathetic mess. We see someone hurting and we complain that their hurts ae their own fault, that if they don't like hurting here, they should go back to where they came from. We read about someone dying in prison because medical care is lacking and we say that if they didn't want to die in prison, they shoudn't have committed the crime. We complain that the cost of their medical care is too high for someone who is the dregs of society.

Our legislators are yelling all over the place about how high the costs are for certain things, how we should continue to punish certain crimes over others even if the crime itself isn't as serious, how no one wants to deal with the problem but them, and then nothing gets done because if they actually did something to fix the problem, most of the voting public wouldn't vote for them anymore.

I'm tired of people who want to play it safe, who don't want to care for anyone but themselves, who want nothing more than their cushy jobs and paychecks that are far higher than they should be for the job they do and they get to give themselves a raise every year. It's time for America to wake up and realize that change is positive even if it doesn't look so in the beginning. It takes time to make changes so let's take that time and at least begin.

Let's start to care again. It's what made us great.

Remembering Randy Pausch

A slight change in topics for this post. In early 2008, I watched a video on a local PBS station that ended up having a major impact on my life. It was called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" and it was incredible.

Carnegie-Mellon University has a long-standing lecture series that used to be called 'The Last Lecture' and is now called Journeys. The premise was, if you only had one lecture left to give, what would it be about. In 2007, they asked Professor Randy Pausch to give the lecture. What I'm not sure they did or didn't know was, it was to be his last lecture at C-M. He'd been diagnosed in 2006 with pancreatic cancer and had found out in August of 2007 that it had recurred and metastasized. He was given 3-6 months of good health left to live.

His lecture was taped and uploaded to YouTube. It hit 1 million views in that first month alone. As of just the other night, it was closing in on 11 million views. And that's not counting how many times it's been downloaded for free from iTunes or bought from C-M University.

What's the big deal about the lecture? He used his greatest gifts of humor and intelligence and gave a lecture that wasn't about how he was living the last few months of his life but how he'd lived his life, period. All the best pieces of advice that anyone could give anyone were in that lecture. Lots of laughter, intimate stories from his life and teaching days, and all given in such a way that you didn't realize what you were really learning, which was how to live your life the right way. He celebrated his wife's birthday at the end of the lecture and he ended it by telling everyone that the lecture wasn't meant for those who'd just finished hearing it. It was meant for his 3 children.

Dr. Pausch died on July 25, 2008. He has been given tons of recognition. Carnegie-Mellon has named a bridge at their campus after him, because he bridged the distance between the different studies there. Disney has awarded 2 fellowships in his name and they have a plaque at Disney World with two of his favorite sayings written on it.

JT's Bottom Line: If everyone could just live their lives the way he did, this world would be a much better place.