I hate the feeling that I'm helpless. I found an old research paper I wrote last year for a scholarship and reread it today because I remembered feeling so strongly about what I wrote and I wanted to remember that feeling. I wrote about the invisible children in northern Uganda, the 20,000+ children there who every night walk many miles by themselves to sleep in the streets of the cities in northern Uganda away from their parents. They do their homework by candlelight, sleep on mats and blankets rolled out in such tightly packed spaces each can hardly move, and then get up before sunrise to walk back to where they are from. As if that isn't horrifying enough, the reason they have to do this is to prevent from being abducted and forced to fight for the LRA, a rebel group there. I was reading my paper, all the completely shocking and horrifying stories children younger than I am had told, children as young as 9 telling stories of killing their brothers and sisters, and I read what I thought about what we should do as wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, and it was sad to think that none of it had been done. That taking all the time to write that paper and come up with these complicated policies at the end of the day does nothing if it isn't put into place properly (or at all). It makes me question the entire idea of political science to begin with. I'm a person of action, I need to do something about issues like this because I feel some sort of overwhelming obligation. But what can all these crazy political theories really do to help these children? All they really need is someone to care enough to do something, to motivate governments and large groups of people to commit to change and engage in the process, which is something that, at the end of the day, political science falls short of doing. I don't think there really is a major for what I'm looking for, but I hope that somewhere in this place I can find the tools to make the difference I want to. Because the world is full of some crazy things, and it's up to us, as the more fortunate, to change them.

It also really always makes me think, why should they have to live through such tragedy and horror when I've been so lucky? Why should I have been able to sleep peacefully in my bed in my house with my parents every night of my childhood while these kids have to walk alone for miles every day to sleep miserably and in constant fear? It's so unfair, I feel like I shouldn't be sitting here on a laptop studying at a school that costs obscene amounts of money while there are so many people suffering? I remember in high school that all through my junior and senior year I didn't even want to stay in high school because I felt so guilty that I just felt like I needed to go out and do something about it instead of sitting in a classroom all day. I felt like I could be saving people's lives and making a difference instead of wasting my time sitting around all day. That feeling's coming back, the itching to go out and do something, to stop all this crap that goes on out there instead of suffering through four more years of this. I know that I need to finish, but I'm impatient to leave and get out and start doing things that fulfill this desire for me to go out and actually see the change I'm making. All this on campus stuff is I guess a substitution, a way for me to get a bit of that out while I'm here, but I know that as soon as I'm done I need to go out and start doing some real work out there. It's bad that I'm getting this antsy already.