The purpose of the Starfish Story is to show how each one of us makes a difference in people's lives. They can be big or small but it really doesn't matter. In the story all the boy is doing is throwing the starfish into the ocean before they die. By just throwing one in at a time the boy has already made a big difference. In life we make difference every day whether we realize or not. They're either bad or good.
In my life I hope that most I make great differences. Most differences are the outcomes of decisions. If I didn't want to study for an important test then I get a bad grade and that means I made a bad difference in my own life. When you make bad decisions you are absolutely, positively going to make bad differences. Vice-versa for great decisions and great differences. We will always make difference whether we want to or not. They're hard to avoid.
Our differences either affect our lives or other peoples lives. A difference I want to try to make is for my little sister. She tries in school but she doesn't want to try her hardest. So I show her that I work hard, try to get into advanced classes and that I get a 4.0. By showing her this example I hope I make a good difference in her life. The reason why is because I see the potential she has and what she's capable of. I don't want her to think her way is to fail. Then she makes a bad difference in her own life.
To the left is a picture of my Grandma Margaret and her brother Robert in the late 1930's. My dad is named after her brother. Even in this picture I can see the love she has for people.
“I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now (Loren, Sophia)." http://thinkexist.com/quotations/past/2.html
If I had a time machine to go back in time I would not want to meet someone famous. I honestly don't see the point. Why would you want to meet someone who really doesn't understand why you want to know who they are? If I was given the opportunity to meet someone in the past I would want to meet my paternal grandma in 1940 to meet her as a teenager. She was born in 1922 and died in 1960 when my dad was eight, so he never really got to know her and I will never know her.
I want to know what she was like. I want to know what her dreams were. Not just for herself but also her six children and her grandchildren. I would want to know what kind of person she was. My dad described her as a 5'11'' blonde hair, blue eyed woman who was just as beautiful and elegant as Marilyn Monroe. Only she had real blonde hair. I want to know what her parents were like. Who I remind her of? I just want to know someone who I don't get to know in my lifetime.
She must have been a wonderful woman who made this world a beautiful and happier place. She was a kind gentle woman. She was a proud Catholic who just maybe wanted to live a little while longer. I don’t know about you but to know that you’ll never know someone who people still talk about today. My mom tells me stories about her even though she didn’t meet her or even know her. The way my mom talks about her is with such admiration and respect. She tells me I have a lot of her traits.
If I got to talk to her I would want to know what she would want to do 50 years from now. I would want to know her before her life really did start. She was married at the age of about 22. She had four children and was widowed before the age of 30. Then married again had two more children, one who died at the age of two, then to die before the age of 40. She had asthma in the winter which was a factor that lead to her death. She died in November in Iowa which is a freezing, cold state so that didn’t help when she was ill.
My dad’s memories of her are her reading him the bible she bought when she was pregnant with him. He says the only thing that kept her going was her faith. She would read him passages and sometimes when she was too sick she would make him or his siblings read it. Today I still have that bible and when I touch it and the handkerchief that still holds the place I feel like I can connect with her. That somehow it makes it possible to time travel back in time to someone who made such an impact on people’s lives.
Even though I know time travel is impossible now, I hope one day I get to meet her. Whether it’s in the past or in another world it would be such a blessing to meet her. I hope when I met her that she would be proud of me to call me her granddaughter.
My family history starts off with my maternal grandmother’s story that starts off in the mid 1770’s in Chihuahua, Chi, Mexico. There my so many great grandparents I don’t know exactly, but they were married in a small Catholic Church. One of their descendants was Justa, my great-great grandma. At the age of about 20 she became a natural citizen. She married a man named Luciano. His father’s name was Francisco and he had lived in Safford, Texas. The more likely reason he lived there was because that part of Texas resembles Italy. More than likely where my great-great-great grandfather’s family was from. An interesting story about my 4thgrandfather is that as a little boy he was stolen by Native Americans and lived with them for about 7 years. When he returned to his family he always wore a bandanna to remind him of what he went through. He also sat or slept on the floor, even as an adult. He was said to have spoken some dialect of Native American.
One of Justa and Luciano’s children is my great-grandma, Valentina Rede and she was born on February 14, 1918 in Artesia, New Mexico. She was one out of ten children and her father was a ranch handler. She wrote me a letter a few years back talking about her childhood. She said she went to school ten miles away from her home in a one room school house where you had to actually build a fire. All of their sons had enlisted for the war so my great-great grandparents moved to Monterrey, California where they purchased a ranch.
When she was in her teens she married my great-grandpa Carlos Hernandez on a snowy day in winter. When my great-grandfather enlisted in World War II and my great-grandmother missed her family who lived in California so she decided to move there. She only took two suitcases and some mementos and was never happier. From there they moved to Salinas, California, where her father built her a house there. They had eight children, four sons and four daughters which one is my grandma, Alicia. Once they outgrew the house they built another house next door but still kept the old one. Both of the houses still stand and my great-grandma still lives in the house. In 2004 my great-grandpa Carlos passed away.
When my grandma was 16 she married my grandpa Domingo Sr. Reyes. When they were still a young couple they lived with my great-grandparents. They raised their three oldest children, my Tia Deborah, my Tio Anthony and my mom, Anthony’s twin, Alexandria. When they saved enough money they move to another house where they then had three more boys, Raymond, Robert, and Domingo Jr.
My grandparents were very hard working people. They both worked sometimes two jobs and still managed to raise a total of six children. How they did it I really don’t know, it just took a lot of rules and values. My grandparents actually knew Cesar Chavez. He actually visited her family’s house, with the children upstairs of course, and talked to both of my grandparents about their opinions on the farm workers.
My grandparents made sure their children were sent to school, but when it came to grades it couldn’t matter much. That didn’t stop my mom who graduated with credits to spare and was the first one to graduate from community college and in fall 2010 my mom will be graduating from UNM. She works very hard and works some more.
She married my dad, Robert, who is Irish, in September 1992. He was born to Margaret and Groden O’Donoghue and has four half siblings and one sister, who passed away at the age of two. My grandma’s family, the Hollands were from Germany and came to Ellis Island in 1922 while my great-grandma, Lavinia Holland, was pregnant with my grandmother. From there they moved to Philadelphia. She was married before my grandpa where she took the name Margaret Jackson and they had four children, one son and three daughters. He suddenly passed away. My grandpa’s parents were from Ireland who came to Ellis Island because of the potato famine. They took work on the railroads and one my great-grandpa was the mortician. He is actually in the history books in the library in Iowa. We are the proud O’Donoghues and we’re very proud of our Irish-Catholic Faith. My grandma Margaret passed away in 1960 and left her five children behind. My dad’s fondest memories of his mom were her reading the bible to him, which I have. My dad’s four older half-siblings were put into foster care because my grandpa was not their biological father, but my dad still has kept relationships with them throughout the years.
My parents lived in Des Moines, Iowa to take care of my dad’s father, Groden, who had Alzheimer’s. When he passed away in 1993 they moved back to Sacramento, California where they had three daughters, myself, the oldest, MaryMargaret and Gillian.
In July of 2003 my family decided to move back to my mom’s roots in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a new start for my family. Unfortunately, at the beginning of 2006 my dad left us and put the responsibilities to raise me and my sisters on my mom. We haven’t talked to him since. My mom now is going to college and still manages to raise us. She is legally blind but that does not stop my mom from overcoming obstacles. She raises us to do extremely well in school and still go to college no matter what we major in. She is personally my hero and the greatest family of all.
According to http://www.change.org"One in three women worldwide will be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime, with rates reaching 70 percent in some countries. This violence not only leaves women and girls with long term physical and psychological scars, but it tears apart communities and undermines efforts to reduce global poverty."
I personally don't believe a woman is below a man. I believe both men and women are equal and have the same rights as one another. There is no the man goes to work while the woman stays at home and cooks, cleans, and raises the children. Although I do respect cultures where the woman stays at home and does that, I don't respect they way that men scare women into feeling there worthless and the only reason there here is to bring children into this world.
It sickens me that women are physically and emotionally abused. What sickens me even more is when young girls are thrown into this rape and abuse. They feel like they have no power and they are told they are worth nothing. Women are for love and comfort, not to be thrown or hit around. We always thinks this happens in third world countries but this also happens in our own cities. The worst part is we do nothing.
Look into those woman's eyes in the picture and try to tell them that you can't do nothing. It's not your fault. You can't help them. You can help them by signing the petition on http://www.change.org/ you can help stop rape and abuse of women. This is a big issue and the more time we take, the more women who are hurt physically and emotionally. Women are for love, not a punching bag or slave. You can make a difference. I signed the petition. Why not you?
"The state is currently spending five times more for the education for a white child than it is fitting to educate a colored child. That means better textbooks for that child than for that child. I say that's a shame, but my opponent says today is not the day for whites and coloreds to go to the same college. To share the same campus. To walk into the same classroom. Well, would you kindly tell me when that day is gonna come? Is it going to come tomorrow? Is it going to come next week? In a hundred years? Never? No, the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality is always, is always right now! ( Booke, Samantha, The Great Debaters)"
That is the basis of the phenomenal movie "The Great Debaters (2007)". This true story movie takes place in 1935 at Wiley College Texas, an all black college, where Henry Lowe, Samantha Booke, and James Farmer Jr. use their voices to be heard throughout the country. During a time where blacks are lynched for just existing, they are lead by Mr. Tolson (Denzel Washington) to show no fear, that their only opponent is God. They compete in debates about a range of topics, from laws to education to human rights. This story follows their success from bottom to top. They defeat all of their opponents even opponents from white colleges. They go to show the color of your skin has nothing to do with the will power of your mind. Their biggest challenge of all is when they are given the opportunity to compete against Harvard. When it comes down to whether or not blacks and whites should attend school together. They debate comes right down to the bone, going back and forth. When James Farmer Jr. is the last to argue that's where every oppurtunity and every chance of winning is put under the microscope.
This movie is truly inspirational. When they speak in this movie you can hear the passion in their voices. I have to give this movie two thumbs up. It motivates you to stand up for what you believe in.
On the left is a picture of a mural by Diego Rivera at the National Palace in Mexico City depicting Mexico's history. It represents Mexico's hard times and good times. It truly captures everything that has ever happened in Mexico. You can see it includes the darkest times, such as death war and the border. To balance it out you have the positive things about Mexico, such as the eagle with the snake in it's mouth to represent their freedom, celebrations and their religion, which is a hard thing to capture. Throughout the mural he tries his hardest to show that each person has faith and keeps striving.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed,sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The definition of colossus is giant; someone or something that is abnormally large and powerful. Lady Liberty is just that. Large and powerful, she stands just over 305 ft from ground to tip of torch, but yet still is so much more just like our moms. Like our mom's, the Statue of Liberty teaches us freedom and democracy as well as international friendships. It teaches us never to discriminate. My understanding of this poem is that the Statue of Liberty represents everything America stands for. The poem says "and her name Mother of Exiles" saying that America will take in the rebellions, the lost, the hopeful and give you the freedom to do whatever it is you please. The Statue of Liberty stands for hope, love and comfort. Lady Liberty is the mother of America and she will be there to see you live a joyful life. My dad's side of the family is Irish immigrants who traveled here to America during the potato famine. I could just imagine my great-great grandparents making that decision to come to America to give their children and their children's children a better life so that they didn't have to work on farms. They wanted to see their legacies go on to be so much more than a farmer. They wanted to see their legacies succeed and when they came to America and saw the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island everything they wanted was what Lady Liberty stood for.
The purpose of the Starfish Story is to show how each one of us makes a difference in people's lives. They can be big or small but it really doesn't matter. In the story all the boy is doing is throwing the starfish into the ocean before they die. By just throwing one in at a time the boy has already made a big difference. In life we make difference every day whether we realize or not. They're either bad or good.
