Live leak

I just spent over four hours watching footage after footage of things I otherwise would probably not have been exposed to had it not been for the convenience of Live Leak. 

After admitting to a mere page that I was over eighteen years of age, just by clicking on CONFIRM, a hyperlink ensured me that I was on my way to seeing the most gruesome and graphic and grotesque of videos in existence. Now I am brutally honest about my age because I am conscious of the fact that I am ageing and that I am not getting any younger, but think of all those who are far younger than eighteen years of age and have access to this website. Most of their parents are digital immigrants so they cannot always prevent this. I mean, is eighteen the right age for people to be exposed to the disgusting doings of other people? Should we even censor anything at all? Should we continue to hide the ugliness of the real world to minors? 

I have to thank the internet for this privilege though. I mean, had it not been to the easy exposure to archived recorded evidence then I would have grown up believing that the entire world ran like Australia did and that wars were a thing of the past and that there exists peace in all nations. I would have grown up to believe that I am safe wherever I roam and that honour killings were myths and that public hangings were illegal. Thanks to the internet, I can lose faith in humanity. I can watch hidden camera recordings of hotel maids cleaning used cups wearing the same gloves after cleaning the toilet and wiping them dry with used towels. I can watch a couple fornicate whilst skydiving. I can watch Chinese people brutally behead an innocent bull and hear it cry in pain and register in my mind that I have been told lies my entire life about animals not feeling pain. And then I can see advertisements of places like McDonalds and crave meat and totally disregard the slaughterhouse video I saw prior to the advertisement of the juicy new burger available for the exchange of a couple of round pieces of nickel. 

The world is sickening and everyone's stories need to be heard. We cannot continue to live so narrow-minded in a world that offers you the viewing class to every aspect of every society. We need to stop promoting world peace and start acting on it. There are too many murders, too many crimes, too many disgusting acts to continue to live in ways that are ignorant to the things that happen in hushed manners. It is not fair that I get the privilege of waking up in a safe country when others elsewhere cannot even shut an eye in fear of being kidnapped or killed. 

But I will not remember this tomorrow. No. The society I live in renders me this way. I have to be silent and accept my fortunate state otherwise I will be seen as a public enemy, and I will have pepper spray behind my eyelids if I dare protest. We have the freedom of speech, yes, but what benefit is that?

Why I Hate Those Who Complain

TED talks would have to be the very contentment of my existence. They offer me a divulging of issues otherwise unknown to me and they bring to light things that have been cowering in darkness.

Being a university student, I experience a lot of complaints on a daily basis, and just when you think that I escape these complaints when I leave campus, you are wrong. These complaints then take the forms of emails, text messages, Facebook statuses or phone calls, and find their ways back to me and I sit there attempting to conjure up an invisible forcefield that blocks all complaints from ever penetrating that forcefield and reaching my ears or my eyes because all I can think about are the necessary complaints that are not narcissistic and that come from those who are forcibly hushed, forcibly silenced, all for the first-world's benefits. And that is still not enough to satisfy.

Years ago, when I was a young child, I had barely anything to play with. I had little technological devices, and I was content. I was content having a shabby camera, a shabby television, a shabby video game console. I was content not having a mobile phone or a computer. I had other things to do, places to be, things to see. I was not spoilt, and I was not selfish, and I had demands only for some things that were advertised to me, naturally. Society, since then, has changed so much.

The other day I saw a toddler with his own iPhone. It was not his mother's, because she was speaking on hers. I stared at him with awe as his fingers kept flicking all over the screen as he walked by. He was immersed in it. If he tripped over at the time and hurt himself, he would not cry from the pain - he would cry from being torn away from his device for the length of a minute. He would cry if he could not achieve a certain score in the game or if his battery was running out.

Juxtaposed with a crying toddler from Ghana who has to carry slabs of stone held up by a piece of cloth hanging from his head, tied to a piece of stick and supported by his head and neck, this display of modern city indulgence is disgusting. Lately I have been exposing myself to a lot of social justice issues and I am continually shocked at how many problems there are with the world and at how little effort is put into fixing these. Why are these people still enslaved?

And to think my peers complain about the cold weather, the hot weather, the mild weather, the lack of weather, the existence of weather, the overly burnt piece of steak, the undercooked corn kernels, the fact that class is running two minutes after the scheduled finish, the fact that teachers share personal anecdotes, the fact that we study about basic human rights, the fact that we study at all. The list, if I record it and write it down, will exceed the length of lightyears and reach Pluto and make Pluto thank its God that it is no longer considered a planet by the peoples of Earth, no longer in their sights and no longer in their thoughts.

Open your eyes. Make a change. Bring things into the light. Watch the video above and indulge yourself in what real problems are. Stop complaining about little things in life, because out there in the real world is a person your age who has nothing. Not even a voice.

The Impact of Teaching

"The average American will meet ten-thousand people in their lifetime. Ten-thousand people - that's a lot of folks; but if every one of you changed the lives of just ten people, and each one of those people changed the lives of another ten people, and another ten, then in five generations, a hundred and twenty-five years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of eight-hundred million people. Think about it. Over twice the population of the United States. Go one more generation, and you can change the entire population of the world."

This is a large concept to grasp, that so little people can affect so many others. It applies not only to America, but also to the rest of the world that the average human will meet around ten-thousand people in their lifetime. And just like negative aspects, so too can the positive circulate around the Earth's population.

One form of circulating positivity is the path that I am currently taking: the path towards teaching. A teacher is no longer just an authoritative figure; not only a parent, nor just a guardian, rather an agent of change. A teacher has the ability to throw one's world upside down in a matter of words. The phrase 'you learn something new every day' is used constantly in an educative environment and it is threaded into the learning atmosphere almost subliminally. Though some students do not wish to be there, they, without a doubt, will be learning things in the entirety of their day. And these things are not necessarily only based on the curriculum, but they can be things associated with every day life.

I am estimating that there are around six hundred students currently undertaking the Bachelor of Education at my university - in total, despite how many years they are into it. And I am estimating that since we will graduate as teachers, that we will be exposed to more people than the average person, thus I will up the average number of ten-thousand to twenty-thousand people. With those calculations at hand, that means that collectively, all of the people currently studying the Bachelor of Education will, in their lifetimes, impact the lives of around twelve million individuals. That is just over half the population of Australia.

The power of education is incredible. Though he does not refer to it directly, Admiral William H. McRaven in the above video encapsulates in the first couple of minutes of his speech just how powerful the impact of one cohort truly is. Prior to that moment, I guarantee the graduating students of the University of Texas did not know just how big they are in such a small world. 

And then I got to thinking; I recently just completed a unit called Rethinking Australian Studies, which ultimately was taught by non-stereotypical looking Aboriginal people who brought forth to our class the need to break free from the stereotyping and tokenising of all Aboriginal people, and brought into light the atrocities committed at the time of European settlement in Australia. The unit went much deeper than that, though, much deeper than the mere 'Sorry Speech' Kevin Rudd delivered - it required us, the students, to choose something to protest for or against, in terms of pro-Aboriginal rights. 

I initially was uncomfortable about the entire idea. I was frightened that the Police would give me a bad record for having to physically take photographs of myself with my protest poster in a public place, and I was worried that I would the get the message caught up and whatnot. Everything, though, turned out fine. In my class I met dozens of new people who I made an impact on with my poster art, I made an impact on my lecturer and two teachers, and made an impact on the people in the city that day who gawked at me standing with my group and our protest signs in front of the Parliament steps. 

And it has made such a difference in my life. There is an uncountable amount of strangers who I probably impacted on with my poster alone, that I have not yet met, yet they count on the people that I have actively changed. Every reaction we obtained would have then caused a chain reaction - those strangers would have gone home, gone to the pub, gone to work, gone to a fitness class and they would have told their friends or family members or co-workers about what they witnessed in the city, who later would have told their friends, family members or co-workers. It is an ongoing reaction. Imagine all the impact everyone would make if more people took a stand for various aspects of social justice. 

And that is the beauty of teaching. Not only are teachers the only teachers, but so are the students. I learn so much from going on pre-service teaching placement. I learn from the staff I meet, the fellow pre-service teachers I meet, and the students. Life is an ongoing lesson. We all matter. We all make a difference. Each choice we have impacts not only ourselves but also others - think about it: change one thing that you did today, whether it be a different setting or a different way of answering something or a different person you sat next to; how much difference would that have made? Yes. A lot.