Well, I haven't written on this blog in quite some time. In fact, I haven't done much writing lately. I've been spending my last free summer relaxing and taking some time for the things that, during every other time in my life, I would think "I wish I were doing". So, naturally I've watched more TV shows, played more video games, and read more fun books than I probably should have, but oh well.
I've been planning on updating this blog for awhile, I even thought of it as my "summer job" of sorts... that didn't pan out as I thought it had but, better late than never. I worked a little bit on an outline because I wanted my first-post-back to be thoroughly thought-out and detailed. There's so many interesting things going on this summer with Supreme Court rulings in June, the George Zimmerman verdict, the NSA PRISM leaks and many others. Hopefully I'll get to write a bit about each of those, but, as you may have guessed from the title, none of those will be mentioned again in this post. Hopefully, you'll understand why.
I had an interesting experience this weekend; as I was driving to my friend's graduation (from college, the same one as me in fact) party, I came upon an intersection where there was a person holding a sign written on a poster board. I'm no stranger to city driving, so I usually callously ignore people walking through traffic with panhandling signs. I was wearing sunglasses, however, so I took a quick look at his sign out of pure curiosity.
All I saw was: "Please make a small donation / high school basketball uniforms". Then, he moved on. Somewhere inside me something stirred. I noticed that the man holding the sign wasn't a man at all, but rather a teenager. He wasn't wearing rags for clothes, but instead a normal inner-city teenagers large shirt and basketball shorts. For the first time in my life, I rolled down my window and gave him all the 1-dollar bills I had in my wallet. It was only $4.00. I noticed, as I put my money in his plastic jar that I was the only person who had even put cash in; everything else was change.
The light turned green, and I drove on.
This moved me more than I expected. Of all things to ask for, basketball uniforms for high school seemed to resonate with me for some reason. A uniform is more than just sweat clothes, a uniform instills pride in the wearer, and generates respect in the eyes of a spectator. It provides identity to the players, it gives them a sense of unity and motivates them. And of all things for a, presumably state-funded school, to cut costs on, uniforms should not be one. Now, public education financing is a messy, often hairy, business. However, it is likely one of the most important state expenditures as it is quite literally an investment in the future with immeasurable possibilities of returns. I don't claim to be an expert on state-funded education but part of me wants to make this a very indignant post about the failures of our public school system. Although, I do know that after school activities have many measurable positive effects on society, especially reducing gang involvement and after-school boredom.
I figured that instead of churning out some boring blog post about what I had planned to write about (those posts will probably come, don't worry) it might be more interesting for me to write about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I feel passionately that society has a responsibility to those who want uniforms. I'm not saying that society bears the sole responsibility for them, but to ignore their plight is to be cold and distant from ones community. There are many things worth writing about, but I'm glad I chose to go with a spur-of-the-moment post.
I feel that I'm beginning to ramble, so I'll stop there for now. If you really want me to post more of the boring-type stuff, keep checking back in the coming weeks!
See you soon,
Tim
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