May 9, 2007 - 4:12pm — sassafras
Inspirations
Hey everybody!
I've been doing a lot of reading this year and have come across some amazing autobiographies and literature by some incredibly inspirational social entrepreneurs. I would love to hear who has inspired you and to start a forum for posting and discussing some of the most inspirational and personally challenging authors/songwriters/artists-whoever.
I would like to begin with an excerpt from Jane Addams' autobiography Twenty Years at Hull House. Hull House, located in Chicago, Illinois, was the beginning of the Settlement House Era, a movement which brought together upper and lower class social entrepreneurs in the same household, to work on the issues facing their communities. Many of the Hull House residents became the policy makers of the 1890s-1920s, including Grace Abbott, Florence Kelley, and Julia Lathrop. They made huge advances in the areas of child labor laws, occupational safety and health provisions, compulsory education, immigrant rights, women's suffrage, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation, and pension laws during the first two decades of the 20th century. Here is what Jane Addams has to say on youth social involvement:
"There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to right wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself. The wrong to them begins even further back, when we restrain the first childish desires for 'doing good' and tell them that they must wait until they are older and better fitted. We intimate that social obligation begins at at fixed date, forgetting that it begins with birth itself. We treat them as children who, with strong growing limbs, are allowed to use their legs but not their arms, or whose legs are daily carefully exercised that after a while their arms may be put to high use. We do this is spite of the protest of the best educators...we are fortunate in the meantime if their unused members do not weaken and disappear...we have in America a fast growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people...are sustaining this shock of inaction."
Amazing how true these words remain today. I applaud all of you for using your legs and arms and minds, for denying that there is some imaginary 'fixed date' at which to begin your citizenship, and for paving your own way to empowerment.
Please use this space to share any of the powerful words that you have heard or read and pass them on to others who need the encouragement!