Today’s guest post is from my friend Marilia Di Cesare. I first met Marilia through the A-List Blogging Bootcamp, and she has amazed me with her adventurous spirit, as both a mother, and an incredibly strong woman. Marilia writes at trippingmom.com. I especially enjoy reading her posts as I imagine her beautiful Brazilian accent might sound. 🙂 Please make her welcome ~
I´ve always been an optimist. But after finding out about more of all the harming we are doing to our world, I started to think there was no chance for the human race to really evolve. We are not civilized yet, we keep killing our people in wars, we keep many hungry. It´s a sad sick world.
But then I got pregnant, which besides being unplanned (fruit from a 3-month relationship), came at a time I had kind of decided to not have kids. I didn´t like the idea of bringing up a child to see the world auto-destruct, I was planning on living my life to the fullest child-free (while there´s still a world full of resources to do it).
With my daughter in the scene, I changed my mind. I started to view a better world, humanity evolving, working together, and extinguishing inequality.
I started to dream about world peace again. More than that, I became an activist, which means I take action. In my tiny world, where I can influence some people around me, I´m spreading ideas of a world with a relevant education, resources and health care accessible for everyone.
It´s sad to see how we know about changes that must be made (our consumerism, for instance, the necessity of sustainability for any product there is) but do nothing about it. Most of us go numb about doing anything that involves change.
Well, we all create our reality, we are living in the world we created and it all starts with a vision. A vision of something much better than what we have now (a 10 year old can talk better than me about this and what adults can learn from kids).
We need all of us seeing the world how it can become, with all people having access to resources, and on top of dreaming about it we need to take action.
Jody Williams gives a great 10 minute TED talk on a realistic vision for world peace, which starts with taking action, specifically about many women in the world taking action right now to attain world peace.
She talks, for instance, about this project to end land mining that happened in different parts of the world. Some people were working full time, some people were volunteering one hour a month, or a week. It didn´t matter how much time people put in it. What mattered is that many people did and it was all the joint work that made results.
We´ve been told lies and not useful information by the mainstream medias over and over. The governments all act like big corporations working towards profit more than the well fare of people. I don´t want to get into politics, but just point out the figures that Jody Williams uses in that talk of US planning to use US$84 billion for modernizing nuclear weapons while the UN estimated the budget for fulfilling the millennium development goal in US$ 80 billion dollars. These figures might scare you and me, but they are actually tiny in a global scale. Well, this example makes it clear that there are many problems in this world (famine or children dying of curable diseases) that can be ended if we take action, if we use the resources we have available.
Thinking about the big picture is quite overwhelming, I know, but if we are not crowd leaders, we can start very little.
Take my tiny example. Besides spreading the practical ideas I learn on my blog and in my circle of friends, I´m also volunteering. I do it only once a week and with my 4-year old in tow. All I do is help serve lunch for a community of indigenous people in Costa Rica. It´s not a huge help, but besides the practical serving food, there´s also making my daughter seeing her mother helping others, so she learns that volunteering is important and a regular part of our lives.
The parents of the world hold big power in their hands. Giving the children a relevant education, through modern schools, homeschooling or unschooling is big. We have to do anything that helps them to become independent creative thinkers and work along their local community.
This is not demanded by any government. They don´t make children take a day off of school to volunteer and that´s something that can (or has to) be introduced by the families themselves. We are to take education in our hands and not simply expect public schools to teach what must be taught in terms of human values (because they likely won´t).
We can´t expect the government, the laws, the status quo alone to guide our actions (or in most cases inaction) towards world peace. We have to take action, decide how and where to act, how much to dispose out time for it, make it big or make it tiny, but ACT.
Marília is a surfer-single mom of a 4-year old. She writes about our values system, how to find a relevant education and ways to keep sanity around a kid. Her single mom blog has lots of unconventional parenting ideas. You can also find her on twitter and on Face Book.
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