The Freedom Writers Diary: Change Is Within Our Reach, All We Have To Do Is Stretch

While laying sprawled out on my floor this afternoon doing my issues homework, with my friend doing her English homework on the couch, we both came across very inspiring quotes about change. She read a poem out loud to me titled, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, written by T. S. Eliot, and I was struck by how perfectly it related to the journal entry I was in the middle of from Freedom Writers. The line that really stuck out to me was, "In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." I kept re-playing that line in my head over and over again. What an incredibly powerful idea! In just a minute, you could change the world. In just one minute you could alter a million lives completely, for better or worse. And in just a minute, that opportunity could be gone. We all have the power to change the world around us, but we have to dedicate the time and effort to do it. We have to be willing to risk everything for change and we can not waste any time. Hannah stopped me in the middle of my reading of Diary entry 43 to read this poem to me, and ironically, Entry 43 was about the poem Moment, by Vincent Guilliano, which is all about determining the importance of change. Ms. Gruwell asked her class a very intriguing question. She asked, "If you could live an eternity and not change a thing or exist for the blink of an eye and alter everything, what would you choose?" (87). There are obvious pros and cons to each option even without reading the poem, but after reading what this question was based off of, I realized that there was a whole other element to this question. The poem said:

Let him wish his life

For the sorrows of a stone

Never knowing the first thread

Of these

Never knowing the pain of ice

As its crystals slowly grow

Needles Pressing in on the heart

To live forever

And never feel a thing

To wait a million lifetimes

Only to erode and become sand

Wish not for the stone

But for the fire

Last only moments

but change everything

Oh to be lightning

To exist for less than a moment

Yet in that moment

To expose the world to every open eye

Oh to be thunder

To clap and ring

To rumble into memories

Minds and spines

To chill the soul and shake the very ground

Pounding even the sand

Into smaller pieces

Or the mountain

Brooding, extinct

Yet gathering for one fatal moment

The power to blow the top clean off the world

Oh to last the blink of an eye and leave nothing

but nothing unmoved behind you

This poem is not simply about deciding whether or not change matters, but it is about asking yourself how much you would be willing to sacrifice to bring about change. To bring about a real change in the world, to dedicate your life to making change, chances are you will miss out on a million opportunities that others experience in life. When a scientist dedicates himself to finding a cure for cancer, he spends every waking moment in his lab conducting research. He misses his children's dance recitals and baseball championships. He misses the moments of joy and the moments of heart break. He sacrifices his personal life completely to give every fiber of his being to the cause. He surrenders his own selfish desires for the chance of saving the lives of complete strangers. He chooses to do so. When a reporter travels to a war zone to uncover the truth about a war or genocide, she risks her own life for the story. She puts herself in deadly situations to discover the details behind the war. She risks her safety and potentially risks her life for the chance to expose the true evil behind the war and find justice. These people risk everything for the complete strangers in the world around them. From reading this poem, I, along with the students in Ms. Gruwell's class, learned that it is worth the ultimate sacrifice to change the world. When you see injustice, you must do everything within your power to put an end to it otherwise the world will continue to turn into the corrupt, cruel world that it already become. If nobody is willing to put their own needs aside in order to dedicate the time and effort to making change, there really is nothing in this world worth living for. You could stay on this earth for eternity without seeing change, and then what would you be left with? Nothing but misery and pain and destruction. I would rather be on this planet for only the blink of an eye and solve one true horror in the world, like ending the use child soldiers, than stay on this planet for eternity and do nothing to change it into a better world.