Two Million+ Reasons To Be Thankful
A friend of mine recommended I watch a movie for an upcoming program I’m attending. It is called Two Million Minutes. It basically says that, using higher math, a student between 8th grade and graduation from high school has about two million minutes to decide what the heck they want to do with the rest of their lives. The movie follows 2 high school students here in the US (in good old Carmel, IN), two students in China, and 2 in India.
My first reaction to the movie as I watched it was, “we’re screwed”. Our high school math and science stats are horrifically inadequate compared to students in other countries. But my second response was, “damn, I’m lucky and thankful” because I had and am having the chance to not only go to undergrad and graduate from college, but I’m now working on my 4th degree. I’m super thankful for the opportunity. However, we’ve got to figure out how to get more of us through the system, and not only get through it, but flourish through it, in order to become our best selves, give back, and be up on that Maslow cat’s hierarchy! If we don’t…guess what? The American Dream is going to be severely and radically altered, and not in a good way.
The second not so gentle reminder this weekend I received was an email from a friend of a friend who sent along a Powerpoint of his tour of duty in Iraq. He’s still there. The pictures aren’t pretty. The cities over there totally need to be rebuilt. People are living in bombed out shells of buildings. They aren’t lucky. Furthermore, neither are our troops lucky while being in harm’s way, and neither are their families lucky because they are gone this Thanksgiving.
Maybe, by next Thanksgiving, we could pull all of our troops out of that area of the world, and take the money spent on guns and ammunition, and instead spend it on education and rebuilding. That way, we can grow engineers and scholars to help us learn how to rebuild better, more peaceful cities. Finally, maybe we can all learn some more lessons on diplomacy and how to get along as a global community.
I am thankful, for these 2+ million reasons this holiday that I live in this country and had all the wonderful opportunities I’ve had…but I wonder, how can we get more people to that thankful place?
