IMPACT was born because of the impact reading Kevin Sites’ blog had on me. Sites is the journalist spending a year touring the world’s `hot zones’ and blogging about it at http://hotzone.yahoo.com/
Whether you think Sites is a master journalist adept at finding the human side of war and destruction, or an ungrateful punk parading his anti-Americanism to the world (and comments to his blogs show both extremes as well as a variety of intermediate opinions) it is compulsive reading. I was moved by stories of Somalia’s garbage scavengers
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1050
a pregnant 15-year-old Ugandan girl
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1286
and an injured Ugandan teenager
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1264
But when I saw the dedication to aid worker Marla Ruzicka and followed the link to the Civic Worldwide website
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1016
I knew I had to become involved with the world out there.
Who am I? I am no one of importance. For the last thirty years I have lived in Australia, been a freelance writer, had a stint as a journalist on a small Australian newspaper, and lived an ordinary life. I’ve never been very political. My husband and I raised seven children and today I am a grandmother, and loving it.
My heroes are the quiet achievers, the people who tackle whatever mess is in front of them and do it without complaint or attention seeking, except for their cause – people like Mother Theresa – and Marla Ruzicka.
I have always been a cleaner-upper. I like tackling a mess, but frankly, tackling the mess the world is in seemed beyond even my just-do-whatever-you-can philosophy. Dropping what change I could spare in collecting boxes and writing the odd letter to the newspaper wasn’t enough. But what could I, a very ordinary Australian grandma, do to make the world a better place?
Then I thought about what I was doing, and what I had done – particularly the pride I feel knowing that my husband and I have raised children without prejudice, without material greed and without feeling their lives would end if someone pulled the plug on the X-Box.
That was hard work in these times, and yet when I see them go out of their way to help someone, I understand that it is hard work for these children, too, to uphold the values we tried to teach them. Yet they do it, because they believe in it.
I may not have much material gain to show for my lifetime, but I hope that what I do have is as valuable as I believe it to be – I have learned tolerance, compassion, and the determination not to back down until a just solution has been found.
The result is IMPACT – Inspiration Meets Positive Action and Creative Thinking – but what does it mean, and what do I hope to achieve?
I believe that we all have something to offer, and what we have is just as important as the billions of dollars that flow to disaster relief. We have something to teach, something to say, a way of looking at the world that will help people cope with crisis and tackle the mess. It doesn’t matter who we are, if we are old, young, poor, handicapped or even if we can access the Web or not – we can all do something, we can do something that lies close at hand – we can help.
Even if all you can do is click on the Hunger Site every day, it is something. If all you can do for the environment is monitor your own water use and recycle your garbage, it is something. If all you can do is pray, it is something. But most of us can do much more.
The Buddha says: `With our thoughts we make the world”. IMPACT seeks no less than to remake the world – with your thoughts, with your actions, with your hands, you can make an IMPACT. Give away your art that carries a positive message, help someone with your skills, get it out there. Some people today don’t understand how to live a good a good and decent life – they think that disaster is an excuse for looting. We who do know should be telling them, teaching them, spreading the word in any way we can.
For a grandparent, this is particularly critical. We watch new generations come into the world and it is getting less and less a good place for them to be. David Suzuki captured me years ago talking about the value that `elders’ could be in the future – well, the future is here, and my gosh! I am an elder.
Time to get to work.
