Nampa Optimist Club

Essay Contest 1999

Optimist International - Friend of Youth

3rd - Kip Smith

     Freedom, it shines white with liberation. Wherever you look in America, you see freedom. Everyone has the right to vote; to chose who is going to lead their country. The right to go where they want to go during the day and to eat what they want to eat. It may not seem like it, but people also have the right to sit around and do nothing. But what of the people who are physically free who can't choose, because there is nothing to choose from, like food or a way of life. There are people like this overseas and right in your own town. People like this aren't truly free.
     Right now there are millions of people who start the day with hunger and that hunger cannot be silenced, because they have nothing to eat. There are people right now who wake up cold or sick and cannot get warm, because they have no where to stay. There are people right now who are prejudiced against and are afraid to go outside for fear of being harmed. There is a child, who sits in a slum with no food. He is starving but his stomach knows it will not get any food so it has just stopped trying. These people are bound, they are not free, a man should not be afraid to leave his house. A man shouldn't have to freeze to death in a city full of people who can help, but instead overlook him because he is nothing to them. People are not things to be overlooked, they are not things, they are people. People who need our help.
     People think, "I don't need to help. There are plenty of people to help, and besides I'm just one person, so I can't make a difference." Yet that one person can make a difference, and if every person who thought, "I can't make a difference" actually tried to make a difference, they would. It won't just go away, if anything it will get worse before it gets better. These people will continue to starve and to die without our help. People don't have to starve in the streets; people don't have to freeze, people don't have to fear for themselves when they leave there houses. We can make a difference.
     When we realize that one person can make a difference and one person can set another person free, we will have true freedom.

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