Madi+S’s+Final+AmEx+2014+Speech

="The Land of the Bickering"=

About a month ago, I, along with some of you guys, got the opportunity to shadow nurses and doctors at Ventura Family Medical Center. Overall, the experience was enriching, fun, and beneficial to my future career in the medical field. But I learned more than just about medical conditions and diseases at this particular hospital. You see, even though each patient’s condition was different, they shared the same sickening quality: ungratefulness. Now I’m not saying that every single patient was ungrateful, but I am saying that there was way too much bickering and cussing, and when we did find a happy, thankful person, it was almost as if the sun had shined through and I instantly felt more comfortable in the room. I gained so much respect for all the doctors and nurses working at VCMC for what they have to put up with on a daily basis. Those 2 weeks of shadows opened my eyes to how unsatisfied and ungrateful even poor people could be. I understand that some of them were in pain or not thinking correctly, but I almost wanted to just look and each one of them and say, “You’re treatment is practically free, yet you STILL treat your doctors and nurses like this?

So, I began thinking about why people barely getting by aren’t grateful for the hospitality that they get, and then I realized that, maybe, it was because they felt __entitled__ to the treatment that they received. I had seen this feeling of “entitlement” many times before in my life. I actually cringe whenever I hear the word now. One experience I will never forget was a couple years when I helped with a backpack drive at church in Oxnard. People in our church had bought backpacks and filled them with school supplies for the kids in our community who could not afford the supplies. When we distributed them, some of the kids came up to me and asked us if we had any Jan sport backpacks, specifically black. I struggled to hide my shocked reaction and point them to another table. Why didn’t they just take the backpack that was given to them? This was not Target, it was a charity event! It was clear which kids truly appreciated the generosity, and which kids just thought this was shopping. The shoppers felt like it was their right to have the best backpack possible, while the grateful kids just hoped they could get one.

A more recent experience happened over October break in San Francisco. It was a very cold morning, and my family and I were getting on to a bus when a homeless lady asked my mom for some money. My mom had literally taken one sip of her coffee, but she offered the lady the coffee. With a disgusted look on her face, the lady told my mom that didn’t want something my mom had already drank from. Now lady, if you were truly hungry or thirsty, you wouldn’t care about my mom’s germs. No, you would grab that Starbucks coffee, skip off into the sunset, and say, “Wow, today was a great day!” Again, this lady showed ungratefulness because she felt it was her right to get a nice cup of coffee.

Entitlement is a dangerous thing. I’m sure most of us have heard the word “entitled” quite a lot lately, but just in case you don’t know what it is, it’s basically the feeling of having the right to something. It’s like a poison that can get into a country and slowly break it down. It causes hard-working people who are grateful for the opportunity to work for their own paycheck to become people with their hands out for money, and no desire to get a job. It causes loss of individuality, for example, in the job market. It causes less competition between people, and good business thrives on good competition to insure the best workers and products are provided for the consumer. Most importantly, it causes grateful people to become selfish, greedy, and unappreciative. Entitlement is only one product of ungratefulness, and I don’t want to characterize all ungrateful people as entitled people. Ungratefulness can also be lack of gratitude or appreciation.

Almost every student I know, including myself, complains about schoolwork. I enjoy learning new things, and I like the feeling of overcoming challenges in school and pushing myself to grow and mature. However, all the busy work, essays, tests, and lab reports just frustrate me. I’d rather be shopping, learning more about football or basketball, reading a good book, exploring a new place, learning to drive, and even spending time with my family then doing homework. I become ungrateful and unappreciative of how lucky I am to even receive an education. Being thankful is hard when you’re in the middle of writing a 10 page paper on bacteria, but I know that it’s only going to make me a better scientist. Lately I’ve felt that I’ve been doing homework to just get a grade and get it over with. I mean, c’mon summer is just so close I can touch it. Still, our teachers give us assignments and tests to make us intelligent people with a vision of purpose and goals to overcome, and we are blessed here at Foothill to get the very best of the best. Most of us are headed to college, and then hopefully, are going to get a good-paying job to support our families. If we realize just how good we have it and how blessed we truly are, then our gratefulness will push us to work harder and not complain about what we don’t have. I’d rather be around happy, appreciative people than sad, bickering ones.

In America, the land that I love, I hope to see young people everywhere thankful for their education and excited to get a job. I hope to see less people being ok with being in unemployment, and actually realize that the government can’t always provide for them. I hope to find schools with kids who are excited to learn and accomplish goals. I hope to see kids who inspire to be like Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, with the desire to be successful, no matter what circumstances you came from. I hope that if I do end up working in a hospital, my patients will be kind and appreciative of me and all of my staff, knowing that the treatments are expensive, and being a doctor isn’t the easiest job. I hope to see citizens of America who actually like living here and who don’t complain about all the rights and money they don’t have. I hope to see appreciation in the simplest things, such as a good home cooked meal, a nice classmate holding the door open for the rest of us, a relaxing day at the beach, or even being able to live in Ventura, CA. Life can be so stressful, and I hope that as we navigate through life, we stop to smell the roses, be thankful we live in a free country where economic opportunity is present, and never forget this AMEX class, that helped us mature, open up, and grow as we enter our adult lives. As in the great words of Native American Tecumseh (someone we learned about, I think), “When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.”

=Cite Your Sources= - My awesome education at Foothill - Dictionary.com - BrainyQuote - Mr. Geib - Great insightful parents