Searching for a JOB

As I job search from the comfort of home, I am torn between the desire to have any relatively decent occupation to start working, or to wait, be picky, and find the perfect job.

Living at home is amazing- I am so thankful I have a home to come back to and parents that see this transition period as launching their international child. However, the amazingness is tainted by the irking feeling that I am much too old and independent to be mooching off my parents and living in Holland again.

Everyday I am reminded as I take a hot shower, have internet and phone services, central heating and food in the cupboards, how lucky I am. Morocco seems very far away from the snow-white world in which I find myself.

Patriotism and Renewable Energy

Somehow terms such as being patriotic, pro-life, and liberal have been twisted to imply connotations that I do not support. This is my Holland Sentinel response to being patriotic:

In 1776, patriots fought for our nation to become independent.

Today we are anything but independent.

In the United States, 55-60% of all oil consumed is imported. As a nation, we use roughly 20.5 million barrels of oil a day. In other words, that is 861,000,000 gallons of oil coming from abroad EVERY single day.

In fact, our oil usage exceeds the total of the next 5 largest consumers – China, Japan, Russia, Germany and India COMBINED.

How did our country become so dependent on others for our main energy source? We forgot to be patriotic. After being hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the US should have responded in a sustained, systematic, and focused way to create an energy independent nation. Making people stupid by telling them that more off-shore drilling is the solution did not help, and will not help, the problem.

Being patriotic means doing what is best for your country, such as investing in new technologies for renewable energies, imposing gasoline taxes, and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that push us towards independence.

Reducing the price of oil, or off-shore drilling, is not the cure. Au contraire, prices need to be raised to break our oil addiction. We didn’t do what was best for our country in 1973 and it’s coming back to bite our pocketbooks now.

Get out your bicycle, turn off the lights, sell your gas guzzling V8, buy carbon credits to offset your carbon footprint, reduce, reuse and recycle. The fight is on, and the US is losing.

Be a patriot and help our nation become energy independent.

ROAD TRIP TO MONTANA

Holland Sentinal Op-Ed Article

Morocco, Islam and Acceptance

I’ve lived for the past eleven months in Morocco, a 99% Muslim country. Upon my return to Holland, I visited lots of family, making up for all the time I had been gone. Once, while talking about my experiences, my uncle said something that shocked me.

“Moroccans, they’re Muslim, aren’t they?” He asked. To my affirmative answer, he replied, “They’re scary.”

My uncle has neither been to a Muslin country nor does he know any Muslims. He is ignorant about the culture, the people and the religion. Yet he KNEW that they were scary.

It made me think of the time I told my mom I hated broccoli soup, without ever having tasted it. It looked green and opaque, hardly appealing, but once tasted, was delicious.

The next day I read an article in the New York Times that stated 13% of Americans believed that Barack Obama was Muslim. That this blatant untruth was so widely believed, concerned me, but I was more upset that these Americans were like my uncle, scared of something they absolutely knew nothing about.

In a land where free information is at our finger tips, could we not be bothered to do a bit of research ourselves? Islam is a peaceful religion that preaches acceptance and tolerance, not so different from the dominant religion preached here in western Michigan. Is Barack Obama Muslim? No, but even if he was, where is the problem?

Here I was coming home from a country where internet is hard to find and information is hardly free, only to learn that a complacent portion of the population didn’t care about tasting something different-- they already KNEW that they didn’t like it. Ignorance breeds fear, and I had come home to a country where many people were fearful.

One of my favorite quotes states, “Travel teaches tolerance.” Not everyone will have the opportunity to travel, but everyone has the chance to learn. Ignorance is what we should fear. Not a religion and people that welcomed me whole heartedly in Morocco and helped teach me the meaning of acceptance.

Amika's Wedding

A look back... interning for Obama.

Early September

I just had the most gratifying first day on the job. Today I stated interning for the Barack Obama Campaign for Change. I learned how to train volunteers, man the front desk and make persuasion call. My heart was thumping as I made the first call. It was the middle of the afternoon, I was calling seniors- likely the only ones home during the school and work day. I left lots of messages and of course got a few a few rude responses, but I have two really great conversations that made all the bad ones worth it. These two grandmothers started the conversation as undecided and by the time we had finished chatting, told me that they were leaning towards Obama. I really felt like by listening to them, and presenting my younger generation’s point of view, they could also look into the future and be hopeful.

CHICAGO- the city that has my heart.

Summer travels- Finland, Denmark, France