Sunday, September 30, 2007

WHO TO CHOOSE??

I’ve never really understood it, just how can you designate someone to be the greatest someone at something that doesn’t have any guidelines or specific requirements, no separate categories and no real way of comparing competitors. I know you can say the smartest mathematician in the world, or the fastest runner or the highest jumper – because you’ve compared them to others in the same category, but how do you say the greatest Hamiltonian? In going through the different people who are up for the spot I got to thinking, how can you really judge this? One person has been to outer space, some politicians, some made their careers in the medical field, and the list goes on. How do you compare doctor’s accomplishments with an astronaut’s? Is it even possible? I wouldn’t even know how to begin to decide who would win. Maybe little designations like these are how society decides the importance of different professions and different qualities in people. Maybe this is how we tell not only which person we like best or who does the best for our world, but which kind of people we like best and which kind of people we value the most. I don’t believe that there is one best kind of person or that we can choose from a group of amazing candidates to say who the best is when they might not even have one similar quality shared between them.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

I WOULD SAVE... MY LEFT FOOT!



A vaccination to prevent four strings of HPV, two that cause 70% of cervical cancer and two that cause 90% of genital warts, why would you not sign your daughter up…yesterday? Some people these days are really living in a magical, fairy tale world, with their reasoning of not giving their daughter the vaccine being: “she’s too young to be sexually active,” “this needle will cause her to be sexually active,” or, “this needle will make her think she can have unprotected sex.”No offence, but can someone clue me in here? Have I fallen down a tree and been dumped into a world of cynicism? I really don’t think so. Parents, if your daughter is in grade six, seven, or eight and you haven’t had “the talk” with them, be sure that someone else has, maybe not as formally, or even in the right way, but she knows A LOT more than you think. If you think that holding back from this vaccine to protect her innocent little ears from the conversation about why she has to get this needle, you should take a check into reality, plus, how bad could some information, from a parent, be about sex? (I don’t know about you but “the talk” I got didn’t exactly make me want to go jump in the sac, it more so made me think that the cooties boys carried around were bigger than I could have ever imagined) If one talk NOW and one needle NOW could SAVE your daughter from cancer LATER, WHY is this decision so DIFFICULT? To quote a teacher interviewed in the Globe and Mail; ““If a doctor said, ‘I can give you a shot to help prevent cancer in your foot,' you wouldn't even think twice about it.” I would save my left foot, my right foot, as well as any other part of my body, no matter what kind of awkward conversation could be brought upon by it.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007