HERE WE GO AGAIN

With only a few months to the December 2012 elections the Ghana is once more caught in the fever of elections and political tension. Thanks to a few people who believe it is their God given right or destiny to attain political office, the good people of this country would have to sit on tenterhooks, with the threat of war and violence hanging over their heads until well into the year 2013.

It is always amazing how we manage to transform even the most basic of activities into something complex the moment politics comes into play. A straightforward voters biometric registration exercise and we make it look like the quest to find life on planet Mars. Every single day since the start of the registration exercise, we are inundated with stories of vandalism, altercations at registration stations, and thugs on motorcycles disrupting the registration process as well as reports of gunshots being fired at one registration center.

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah

To crown it all, we have “well educated” political pundits who, having the opportunity to appear on media platforms every waking moment, fling allegations back and forth, threatening fire and brimstone at their political opponents accusing them of disrupting the registration process and promising retaliation. In the comfort and safety of their homes and offices, they call on ordinary Ghanaians, who barely earn enough to get by, to defend themselves at all cost.

If Ghanaians and especially the media dedicated as much time and energy to discussions on  improving the educational system or the economy as they do to politics, the country would be in a much better shape than it is now. If all else fails maybe, our engineers should devise a way to harness the empty political rhetoric we seem to enjoy so much in this country into turning the turbines at the Akosombo Dam. Then for the first time, we might actually have something positive materializing out of this mud fest we call politics in our country.  

Ghanaians went through similar state of affairs in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008, now we have the same song playing as we head to the 2012 elections and honestly, the record is getting old. You would think that after five successful free and fair elections we would have attained enough political and mental maturity to view elections as just another process. It does not have to be an all out battle to the death where the winner takes all.

We pride ourselves on being a peace loving country but so did the people of Liberia and Ivory Coast and look what happened to them. From the few accounts I heard from people who lived in Liberia preceding the war, there was no indication or prior warning  that they would soon be plunged into a decade’s long civil war from which they are only now emerging.

Peace is never guaranteed, as the examples in Liberia and the Ivory Coast clearly prove. We have to make a conscious effort to maintain the stability of our country. However, until we move pass the point where we ascribe godlike and mythical attributes to our politicians we can only hope and pray this country still exists come 2013.

 

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish: A tribute to Steve Jobs (Feb24, 1955 – Oct5, 2011)

Today’s post is dedicated to one of the greatest minds of the century. Steve Jobs was an innovator and a  visionary. A college dropout, yet he dared to challenge the status quo and forge his own path in life.  This is a very inspiring speech he gave to graduating students at Stanford University. I hope this speech inspires visitors to the blog as it has done millions of others.

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

The Pointlessness of Your Life Revealed in Email

What were you doing this day a year ago? Thanks to your obsessive use of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and/or Instagram, this information can now be mined in the blink of an eye. Sadly, the answer will probably be depressing.

The New York Times‘ Jenna Wortham signed up for a variety of digital nostalgia services, including PastPosts, MorningPics, and the horribly named “4squareand7yearsago” (get it?).

Each emails you a summary of what you did one year ago on a particular social network. They are fun to read about, but kind of depressing in practice. Odds are, your life has changed very little in the past year. Here’s what the narcissism newsletters told Wortham about November 16, 2010: “I spent the day working from a local coffee shop. As the sun began to set, I picked up some takeout from my favorite eatery and spent the rest of the night writing in my living room.” Ugh, the quintessential day in the life of a tech writer. We know the pain. How did Wortham spend today? Tech writing, apparently.

Social networks: Giving you a front row seat as the lives of you and your friends are slowly subsumed by social networks. Since 2002.

[Image via Shutterstock.com]

Credit: Gawker.com

Watch This Space; Peter Mensah

This is a new series I have started on my blog profiling Ghanaians or people of Ghanaian descent who are excelling in the fields of arts and entertainment, sports, academia etc outside the country. Though they may be excelling in their chosen fields, they remain relatively unknown within the country. This series is to shed more light on their activities

PETER MENSAH

Unquestionably he has starred in more Hollywood blockbuster movies than any other Ghanaian actor I can recall. Peter Mensah has acted alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood including Bruce Willis, Lucy Lawless, John Hannah, and Demi Moore among others.  His film credits include roles in 300, Tears of the Sun, Relic Hunter, The Incredible Hulk, The Highlander, Earth: Final Conflict among others. Peter Mensah also played the leader of the tree tribe in the most successful movie of all time James Cameron’s Avatar. According to IMDB “He met James Cameron in a parking lot, and Cameron cast him in Avatar on the spot”.

Photo credit: celebritybio.net

His most successful role and the one which has won him much praise is as the mean, hard hitting-take-no prisoners- “Doctore” in the critically acclaimed series Spartacus.

Photo credit: monstersandcritics.com

More information on Peter Mensah is available here and here. Follow this link to his facebook fan page.

Disclaimer:  Photographic images are owned by their respective copyright owner. Where possible the appropriate accreditation is given. Where ownership is known a credit is as given.

If you wish to see pictures or content on this blog removed, please specify which ones, show proof of ownership and allow time for these to be removed.

If football leagues were Ladies

If football leagues were Ladies
by Frank Lin

The English Premier League is that not too beautiful girl who tries to keep up appearances, she very exciting, loud and fun to be around
Spanish la liga is the beautiful and very organized girl who does not like to try on new and innovating things thus she is extremely boring
The German Bundisliga is the girl who is only beautiful because of her dad’s money, friends make her live a wild life, her boyfriend tries to make her act responsible, get a job and has to cope with corporate life but she blends all to suit her perfectly
Spanish sieria A, the miss independent boss lady type ,who believes in gender equality, she is  good looking but takes firm decisions and does not tolerate much nonsense
French league 1 is the very cute girl who does not get the attention she deserves, she has a lot to offer but because she doesn’t command interest like the others she has been forced to be quiet and reserved

The Ghana Glo premier league, hmmm!!! An average African beauty, born beautiful and does not believe in complementing her appearance with cosmetic products.  She believes you should like her for who she is if you don’t well that’s your problem.

South African league she is quiet and very pretty, but has learnt to be exciting, a bit authoritative, though people notice her they are simply not interested in finding out more about her

Brought to you courtesy of:  frank Lin, the football professor.

 

THE KEVIN PRINCE BOATENG SAGA AND MATTERS ARISING

To describe Kevin Prince Boateng as unpopular within Ghana would be a gross understatement. His decision to “resign”, due to health reasons, from international football and by extension the Black Stars can only be described as shocking at the very least. At the young age of twenty four, one would have thought Kevin Prince Boateng still had a lot of vitality within his legs to churn out a few more sterling performances for the Black Stars.

Apparently, whatever health reasons he stated seem to afflict him only when he wears the jersey of the Black stars and not that of his club side AC Milan. I believe he deserves the benefit of the doubt, with the multitude of infections out there in the world perhaps he contracted one which is triggered only when he plays football in our hot African climate, who am I to condemn him, his doctors know best.

The Kevin Prince Boateng debacle raises the larger question of the nation’s love affair with foreign based players and players opting for nationality switches. From where I stand I believe we have developed an overreliance on foreign players to the detriment of our local footballing talent. All one has to do these days is to be a Ghanaian of foreign descent, request to switch nationality and you are guaranteed an automatic first team place in the Black Stars.

It appears the GFA prides itself on the number of foreign players it can gather into the national team, even to the extent of assembling high profile delegations travelling from continent to continent just trying to convince players to opt for the Black Stars. The GFA claims every player whether local or foreign has an equal chance of making it into the Black Stars but we all know the foreign players have the first rights of refusal and only then does the GFA begin to consider the local players.

One interesting point to note is that in the case of the foreign players most of them decide to join the Black Stars only after all efforts to secure call ups to their home sides have failed. Why do we continue to make these players a priority when to them we are only an option?

I doubt they possess any extraordinary abilities which cannot be found in of our local football players yet we are prepared to bend over backwards simply to please them.  Everyone complains about the decline of the local league yet we do not realise that our relegating local players to the background is a contributing factor. What higher honour and motivation is there to a player than to receive a call up to serve his nation at the highest level yet we deliberately ignore our locally based players and complain when they fail to deliver top notch performances every time.

Ghanaians everywhere must have an equal chance of earning a call up to the national side irrespective of which part of the world he happens to originate from. Granted there are some foreign players whose performance for The Black Stars is above average and worthy of commendation. However the preferential treatment accorded to some of them must stop. No player is bigger than the national team and no player has a permanent place in the Black stars subsequently anyone who displays insubordination should simply be excluded from selection. There are thousands of success hungry youngsters out there more than eager to prove their worth; all they need is the motivation and the right platform.

All said and done you have to admire Kevin Prince Boateng for the calculating way he approached the Black Star call up, almost like a business venture. When he realised his career was in a decline and the threat of relegation looming in his face he needed an escape route and who should come calling but the Black Stars. He played a few games, performed admirably and now that his career is steadily rising he realises it is time to back up his bags and bid goodbye to Ghana. Almost like businessman who invests money in a bank then later withdraws to invest elsewhere after the initial profit has been made.

To be honest I hope he wins the CAF player of the year award for no other reason than to see how Ghanaian football fans would react.

21st Century Journalism

The proliferation of social networks aided by the increase in modern technology such as modern technology such as mobile phones as mobile phones etc. have a mixed impact on the field of journalism in ways most people would not have thought possible some years back.

The rapidly changing media environment has left many of the old generation journalist and media agencies scratching their heads in bewilderment as they struggle to keep abreast with the rapidly evolving media environment.

Journalism evolved from the traditional media into the era of technological advancement; news gathering and dissemination is no longer the sole preserve of professional journalists and media institutions. In this era of information technology, anyone with access to a blog, camera, mobile phone and internet connection can effectively practice journalism.

The average person on the street has become as important to the provision of news content as much as the trained journalist employed by the media house.

For the first time, the audience is no longer a passive consumer of the news, but now they now have the opportunity to actively partake in making the news based on what is of interest to him or her without going through the constraints faced by practitioners in traditional media.

Social networks like the Facebook, Twitter and Blogs have aided this revolution, providing a ready platform for a more inclusive practice of journalism. It is not surprising that international events and crisis are first reported on sites like twitter before the traditional media can get on the ground to provided coverage.

People are no longer limited to accessing information from a single viewpoint; this was better expressed by the founder of wikilleaks Julian Assnage, when he stated, “we are reclaiming the rights to share ourselves and our times with each other- to be writers and agents of our history.”

Social networks and the practice of citizen journalism are largely credited with fuelling the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and the larger Arab States dubbed “the Arab Springs.” Technology provided protesters with the means of sharing information among themselves and the outside world, which was otherwise restricted by governments.

At the height of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia information was shared by the average citizen through word of mouth, mobile phones as well as sites like youtube, facebook etc after governments restricted internet access and the movement of journalists belonging to international media agencies.

The protesters developed a unique network of information gathering and sharing, which ensured that every aspect of the revolution was made readily available and on demand to the rest of the world, the same technique is currently being employed by citizens in the revolution in Syria.

Without doubt the exposure of video footages of atrocities, torture and killings perpetrated by the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes to the rest of the world helped tip the balance of power in favour of the protestors.

 
photo credit: http://www.inmagine.com

  SHORTFALLS OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Although citizen journalism and social media are relatively new, it is not without its own set of challenges and criticisms, namely, does the ethics and standards of traditional journalism apply to this new form of journalism?

For instance, traditional journalism places emphasis on objectivity; reporting the truth without bias or attempts at interpretation or editorialising from the reporter. Reporters in traditional media houses are also governed by a basic set of rules and guidelines in order to maintain the integrity of the profession.

In addition, mainstream journalism has been practised for decades, thus society has had time to fine-tune it to ensure best practises are kept and maintained. Mainstream journalists can be located and held accountable for their actions, in comparison, people who upload contents on blogs and websites are relatively anonymous and there is always the temptation to add their own opinions and thoughts to drive at a specific agenda. The lack of such standards regulating the practice of citizen journalism raises questions of credibility in an age where anyone can upload stories without crosschecking or editing.

The major shortfall of citizen journalists is that they are only governed by a moral obligation to themselves and the public.

HOW CAN TRADITIONAL MEDIA REMAIN RELEVANT

Digital content has become as significant as more traditional content like newspapers but it does not mark the death of traditional media yet. Traditional media is still considered the primary and most respected news source in many places across the world. However, there is still the need for traditional news agencies to make an effort to incorporate elements of new media in their activities.

One way to do this is to have and maintain an online presence as a way of keeping up with the change and maintain relevant against all odds.

Creating an online community where users can submit articles, comments in addition to discussing stories of interest would keep readers entertained.

In terms of training the new crop of journalists, emphasis should be placed on empowering them with the skills and expertise necessary to meet the continuously changing needs and demands of the consumer in the current information technology age.

5 Reasons Life Actually Does Get Better pt 2 by John Cheese

#2.

Until You’re On Your Own, You Don’t Know What Freedom Is

First of all, don’t look at your parents boring lives and assume that being an adult means living according to their template. No, you don’t have to ditch the video games and take up a “grown up” hobby like golf if you don’t feel like it. See, once you’re an adult, you get to decide.

Want to stay up until 4 a.m. on a Wednesday? Go for it. Want to eat straight whipped cream right out of the container? Have at it. Adulthood is being able to get into your car at 2 a.m. and just drive for no reason at all. It’s growing past being dragged to Mom’s church every Sunday and being able to decide for yourself what you want to believe. It’s eating pie for supper. It’s choosing your own friends and buying your own clothes. It’s sitting three feet from the TV screen, just because you fucking can. It’s watching a movie for no other reason than it has a lesbian sex scene with Natalie Portman.

That’s not to say that there are no repercussions for doing those things, but by God this is your life now, and you have the right to learn those lessons in any way you choose. You own those repercussions. They’re yours, no one can take them from you.

For instance, almost everyone I’ve ever met — and I’ve lived in six major cities in the United States — complains that they “have to get out of this shitty town.” I heard it in small-town Illinois, I heard it in Los Angeles, I heard it in Minneapolis. There are like two dozen hit rock songs from the 80s on that subject. Well, as an adult, you have every right and every opportunity to make that happen. You might fuck it up and wind up living in your car, but it was your doing. That freedom is the most powerful tool you’ll ever own, and it’s exactly what enables you to continue growing. And you will grow.

Yes, you’ll have problems. But they’ll be your problems. And besides, what would you do without them? The problems are what get you out of bed in the morning. They’re what makes succeeding at things such a goddamned rush. You can’t be a dragon slayer without dragons.

People talk about a “real world” after graduation, as if that’s when the “real” stress starts. And in some ways, they’re right. But nothing takes away from the feeling of being at the wheel, doing things on your own terms. Besides, there’s something you should know about the “real world” …

#1.

The World isn’t as Bad as You Think

When you’re a kid, your parents shelter you from the worst of what’s really going on in the world. As you get older, your worldview changes and expands. You start to think outside of your own town and social circle. You’ll see a metric fuckload of bad news. Violence, government scandals, wars over seemingly petty bullshit. At some point (maybe later in high school but most seem to save it for the college years) you’ll get cynical. “Why should I live in this world when it’s so shitty?” Or later, “How can I bring a child into this living hell?”

We forget that what is happening now is the opposite of what your parents did. They sheltered you from bad news, but the news media shelters you from good news. They literally filter it out; among all of this horrible information coming out of the nightly news, there is so much good that goes unreported because it doesn’t get the same ratings.

But as for the bad shit, there has to come a point where you realize the same thing I’ve touched on over and over again in this article: As an adult, you are now part of the world and you do have some power to change it. As a kid, you didn’t have the power to change shit.

The reason you need to live in a world with all of this shitty news is because that world needs you to help fix it. The reason you can bring a child into this life is because when you pass on your morals and beliefs to them, that’s one more soldier on the field to fight for the good side.

Chances are you’re not going to show up and disarm a bomb at the last second on a plane filled with a hundred innocent people. But you can absolutely donate some trivial amount of money to make sure some farmer in some oppressed country can get medicine to his family so that they can help him harvest the crops that will in turn feed entire villages.

Life gets better because you’re going to make it better. Because you’ll have the power and the freedom to make it better.

It’s incredibly difficult for a teenager in the throes of angst or a college kid knee-deep in debt and stress to see any of that. Depression is like that. It shrinks your view of the world, it chokes off the horizon. You feel like you’re being tea-bagged by life — its hairy ass cheeks planted firmly over your eyes so you can’t see anything else.

Don’t mistake those ass cheeks for the whole world. The world is actually out there, beyond that ass, and time and effort will make that clear. You have to survive it first though. I promise you, it gets better.

Read more: 5 Reasons Life Actually Does Get Better | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-life-actually-does-get-better_p2/#ixzz1ckERDlxu

5 Reasons Life Actually Does Get Better Pt 1 By: John Cheese

This is actually an inspirational article i read recently from cracked.com; a comedy site, and I thought i’ll share with all of you

In the last year you’ve probably heard “It gets better” used as a motto to encourage gay teens who’ve been the victims of bullying. This is not a rebuttal of that, because I am not an asshole. What I do want to do is expand that message to everyone that age, whether you have a bully problem or not.

I figure it’s time, as I tend to write about dark and often brutally depressing subjects, like how I was a smoldering drunk for over half of my life and how much my parents sucked at being parents. But I do it for a reason. I figure there are a lot of people in the same situation who feel like they’re alone. That’s always the worst part about having a shitty life in your teens or 20s, feeling like everyone else in the world has it figured out but you.

So, as a man with a truly shitty past, let me say that it’s not just a slogan. It does get better. Specifically …

#5.
The Money Situation Will Improve (Even if it Doesn’t)

I’m not saying you’ll be rich when you grow up. I’m saying it’s really not about money. It’s about freedom.

My girlfriend and I recently broke into the middle class after years of living one paycheck away from homelessness. And when I say “years” I mean all the years from age 15 to age 36. It was never easy, and often was the emotional equivalent of being on the receiving end of a never-ending gang fuck by a herd of Flavor Flavs.

But even at the lowest point of that bottomless pit of gold-plated testicles and giant clock necklaces, I wouldn’t have traded it for a chance to be 15-years-old again. Why? Because at this stage of your life, you finally have some control over the situation. And when we talk about things getting better, this is at the heart of it.

As a kid, you just have to sit back and take it, not fully understanding why you’re living the way you are. You’re dependent on your parents’ decisions and actions, whether they lead to bankruptcy or a new swimming pool. A lot of that pressure you’re feeling in your teens and 20s is really just powerlessness. You feel like instead of driving the car, you’re tied up in the trunk.

When you get out on your own, your financial future is yours, and you can steer that bastard where you want it to go. It’s not easy, but even when it’s hard there is something liberating about the fact that even if you crash our proverbial car through the front window of a liquor store, it was your decision.

And just to make sure you didn’t skip over the “it’s not easy” part: If you think “it gets better” means you can sit back and wait for a naked genie to fart cash into your living room, it will not. “It gets better” doesn’t mean life lets up, it means you no longer have to submit to it. Not like when you’re a kid, when your parents can divorce without your consent or make you change schools or make you get a stupid haircut. When you’re an adult, you can get pissed and swing back.

Please, don’t wait as long as I did to learn that lesson. My entire adolescent life was spent in poverty because my parents gave up and just accepted that life was a spiked enema, and they just had to bend over and take it. They made no effort to improve their situation, and so that’s the lesson my siblings and I took with us when we got out on our own. “There is no escaping your financial fate.”

I didn’t push back until I was forced to. After 14 years of working an incredibly insufficient, shitty job, my back finally said, “Fuck this,” and I was physically unable to do it anymore. I had nothing to go to. No backup plan. No savings. No family to turn to. And then I realized that I did in fact have skills that people would pay me to perform.

When I wasn’t writing, I was putting in applications all over town. In the next town. In towns 30 minutes away. I applied to places online. When there was no gas in the truck, I walked to put in more applications. I swung harder. There are some days that I write for 16 straight hours, knowing that everything I just typed will be deleted and replaced with a completely different idea, or rejected outright. And that’s OK because the success or failure is mine, not somebody else’s. You can’t put a price on that.

#4.
You Will Find Someone

There’s a human trait that can sometimes be incredibly beneficial to growth, while at the same time devastating to morale. And that’s the desire to have something right fucking here, right goddamn now. If you point that urgency toward something like getting a better job or a promotion, it can be a powerful tool. That urgency is what made all human civilization possible.

It’s not so hot when you’re lonely and want a companion — especially when you’re young and watching all of your friends joining the boob buffet and you’re still alone every weekend. I’ve seen over and over in my life, people (including myself) who sink into depression because they don’t feel that they’re ever going to find love. So they look, and look, and look. Depending on who you are, you’ll try bars, grocery stores, libraries, online dating services, friends of your mother. Then you latch onto the very first person who pays you any attention, even if they’re not right for you. Because, shit, what if nobody else ever comes along?

Then months or years later, you find yourself lonely again, or worse: in a catastrophically bad relationship that you’re afraid to leave. “It’s better to be in this shitty hookup than to be alone,” you’ll tell yourself, knowing on some level that you’re full of shit. Eventually you get to the point where you blame yourself. “I’m too fat. Nobody will ever love me.” “I have this third arm growing out of my forehead. I have no chance.” What is hard to realize from that state of mind is that it’s the desperation itself that’s screwing you. If you’re trying too hard, people can smell that a mile away. That in itself is ass-repellant.

I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone who went their whole life without a “significant other.” But I’ve met plenty of people whose dates took an abrupt halt when they let slip with, “God, before you came along, I was just close to putting a gun to my temple and- oh, the steak is finally here!”

You have to relax. It turns out some lessons taught by romantic comedies aren’t full of shit: Concentrate on taking care of yourself first, because 90 percent of a relationship’s success is a matter of maturing into the type of person other people want to be around.

If you’re young (in high school or college) you don’t even know who you are yet. Those early, failed relationships, or lack of a relationship, do not doom your prospects for romance for the rest of your life. Hell, at this point it wouldn’t even matter if you met the love of your life — you haven’t even fully become the person who will eventually have something to offer them. Getting down about success with romance at this point is like giving up on a team in the preseason. In your early 20s, your starting players haven’t even come off the bench yet.

But this still applies later in life — I got divorced after a 10 year marriage, and found myself right back in that same, desperate place, scared of being alone. I didn’t find anyone until I decided to stop worrying about that and start worrying about making less of a mess of my life. It makes sense, looking back — when you’re in that desperation mode, you put up fronts, and try to be the person you think the guy or girl wants. And that may work for one night, but when you both settle down, that outer “first impression” shell disappears, and you turn into you. Suddenly, you’re “not the person I knew when we first met.” And they’re right. Because the person they met wasn’t you.

If you get more comfortable with yourself, you stop trying so hard, you get more relaxed and don’t feel like you have to work so hard to hide your true self. You don’t stop looking for someone, I don’t mean that; you just stop hating yourself so hard for not finding them. I know it sounds like a Catch-22, but it’s the lack of self-hatred that will make you attractive.

#3.
High School is NOT the Best Years of Your Life

I’m not going to sugar coat this: Adults tell you that high school is the best time you’ll ever have because they’ve forgotten what it was like. They just remember the part where they didn’t have to worry about bills, and their hindsight becomes so focused and narrow that it couldn’t see the period at the end of this sentence.

The truth is, for many if not most of us, high school is one of the most difficult times you’ll ever live through. At that age, you’re expected to act like an adult while gaining none of the benefits of adulthood. You are criticized for virtually everything you do by just about every adult in your social and family circle. You’re expected to start holding up responsibilities, but under their rules.

Everything I said above about how you need to be yourself and grow into a fully formed human being before your life can really start? Those teen years don’t make it easy. If you look at porn, you have to hide it. If you hang out with friends that your parents don’t approve of, you have to cover it up. When you go out, you have to be home by their set schedule. The house is decorated their way. You eat what they cook. You dress to their standards. You lose every argument because “You’re only 16, you don’t know what you’re talking about yet.”

And the entire time you’re dealing with all of this stress, your body is fucking with you from the inside out, blasting you with hormones and chemicals that you’ve never experienced in your entire life until right now. You’re sexually awkward because you don’t have much, if any, experience. If you’re not ready for sex, you’re made to feel like an outcast, and you’re instantly ostracized from certain social groups. It is terrifyingly hard. Some people don’t make it through. You fucking will. Why?

In just a few years, you’ll be on your own. Maybe you’ll go to college or maybe you’ll start work right away. Either way, you will, for the first time in your life, be the master of your own domain. You’ll come home from a hard day’s work and throw your pants on the floor because they’re your pants. It’s your floor. Your rules. And as you spend the rest of your pantsless day, relaxing on your self-made pantscarpet, there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it.

Why? Because…

CELEBRATING MEDIOCRITY IN GHANA

It is my belief that Ghanaians have forgotten what excellence is. We have become a nation prepared to praise and award the mediocre. Politicians in the country have noticed this phenomenon and exploit it to the best of their advantage. However the question is can you entirely blame them? After all they are only giving the people what they ask for

It always amuses and irks me to see almost an entire village out in force with politicians who have probably driven halfway across the country with an entourage of media men to inaugurate a single bore hole in some remote part of the country. Ghanaians are quick to make a ceremony out of everything, the people have been supressed and tricked into believing they are receiving a favour when it is actually an entitlement

Everyone agrees that it is pointless to praise someone for taking care of their children, for staying out of jail or doing something they are supposed to as part of their everyday work. Why then are we ready to sing the praise of politicians for providing us with simple creature comforts such as schools, hospitals, portable water and electricity? Such amenities and social interventions are not a privilege; they are the right of every Ghanaian to have.

However a single street light or a school, whose only renovation it has seen in fifty years is a new coat of paint applied, being inaugurated is enough cause for a celebration or state durbar in our country. Considering the alternative of living in constant darkness or drinking water infested with guinea worm that is probably the reason we are always exceedingly thankful to our political overlords for being so generous as to lavish us with such fine “gifts”. How blessed we are.

No elected official is doing Ghanaians a favour by being in office, it’s not like Ghanaians begged them from their jobs to become public servants. So if they cannot serve the public to the best of their ability without expecting to be treated like God’s gift to humanity they should choose the simple option and just quit and go back to their so called well-paying jobs. To aggravate matters, the “gifts” provided are often hand me downs from donors and are mostly subpar and of poor quality.  

 I am not advocating that we just shrug our shoulders and walk away but true accolades should be reserved to those who have achieved something out of the ordinary. Praising everything and nothing only serves to cheapen the praise and make politicians feel good about themselves.

Praising people for the little things makes them complacent and prevents them from taking pragmatic steps to solve the innumerable problems we have in our country. So next time you think of heaping praise on some politician for one “good deed” or the other please ask yourself are you praising excellence or mediocrity.