On October 23, I got to listen to a worker from the Georgia Conservancy talk about the projects that she had played a part in, and the efforts that were made by the Georgia Conservancy, an organization that I had not even known to have existed before the presentation, were surprisingly large scale and very public. They worked all around the state in order to improve the living quality of the people through the use of proper planning of transportation, conservation of ecology, and moderation of the consumption of certain finite resources. To say the least, I was impressed to see a powerful group of people that worked actively with the government and for the greater good of their states-people.
One of the most interesting facts to me was that this strong organization, which has a formidable amount of workers and researchers in this present day, had started with a single man: US Congressman James Mackay. Of course, he did not work on a whole issue of environmental stability by himself; but the people that he worked with were not researchers with Ph. D’s and esteemed politicians. They were a “group of concerned citizens” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Normal people who had happened to stumble upon and feel anxiety about an arising issue; people that fell in the same category of human being as me.
This made me wonder about what I had done for the betterment of the general welfare of the public. If a person like me, an average person, but a person with a voice, hands, and feet, had put my efforts into bettering my community, I could have accomplished something, even if that something was not majorly significant. However, in light of the fact that there are millions of people who have the potential to act just as I do, I suddenly felt that there was a sleeping force that lay stagnant within the people of my community, including myself. There was the opening of being able to actively serve the community with various activities, whether they are individual efforts to send emails to important figures about the problems in the community or massive, unified events where people can create a large body to influence the planning and creating of their communities. Otherwise, there is no way that the government, which often seems like a distant power with no empathy for certain people, to know who to account for in their actions. Our voices in the political stage could provide energy for the government to act more precisely and effectively, minimizing the dissent of people who may have stayed silent and been overlooked.
The important factor for being active about the community is keeping on the lookout for the potential problems, or problems that have been ignored for a time. It is in all of our powers to be active, just as the Georgia Conservancy is today. As a young college student, I feel as though there is potential for change in my new home, Georgia Tech, and I hope that I can be a participant in that change when the chance arrives.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1010