Blog Post #2

  "Through careful, conscientious reflection on our lives – on our privileges and struggles, and on those of the people we love and respect and fear and find unfathomable – we can begin to identify ways to take action and effect change"(Public Advocacy: Commitment and Responsibility).

 When I think of the goals I wish to achieve in life, most revolve around improving the world in various aspects. Its seems as if most people’s goals center around this. When I begin to think about how I will personally achieve this change or accomplishment everything begins to get a little blurry.  The quote above, taken from the Public Advocacy: Commitment and Responsibility reading, gives me some sense of clarity. To me, this quote mean we must find space in our lives to see ourselves from various perspectives. We need to understand the benefits we have grown up with, while at the same time, understanding the hardships we have faced. We must see how these experiences have impacted us and skewed our views of the the world and others.

In all of our communication classes, we talk about being an active and conscious listener. Contributing and providing feedback/responses as the conversation requires. I try to take it even a step further than this. When trying to understand issues in the world we first must listen. We need to build an understanding of what is going on around us. As the quote points out, even though something may not be an issue to us, we must see it from others viewpoints. I can think of dozens of examples were I initially would not have considered something to be a problem. Sometimes I was not aware it even existed. I only began to see such issues after talking and traveling to other locations, seeing a completely different point of view. I think this is tremendously important because if we only consider our own view point we would have an awfully filtered and obscured view. I really believe much more can be accomplished when we consider factors like our privileges and struggles as the quote points out.

 I recently read a very interesting article that discussed regarding being a more conscientious person. In fact, it was titled “HowYou Can be a More Conscientious Person, And why it's worth it”. One of the point it focused on is that you should slow down and really think about your response. It goes on to say that it “stops you from wasting time”. The reasoning behind this is because your actions are more meaningful and thought out. The last meaningful quote I would like to pull form this article is, “It's important to check in with yourself throughout the day, taking time to truly think”. For me this quote goes back to the importance of checking our privileges and struggles. This is a continued theme in this post.

One other aspect we can see how this is important is the example given in class 9/26/17 regarding dress code and how often times the individuals making the dress code are far removed from the student who actually have to follow it.