6,285 Reasons Not To Quit
December 4, 2008 by pablo
Lately I’ve been tempted to stop reading the paper. Like everyone else in the nation knows, each time you pick up the paper (or log on) there is bad news waiting to be read. From the recession to the terror attack in India to my @#$# USC Trojans being left out of the college football championship, there is bad news everywhere. Now is an easy time for a lot of people to quit, whether it be a new venture or a new idea or, in our case, a project like Libertad.
In this dismal economy who in their right mind could think they could raise $100,000 to pull off their project, no matter how innovative? I don’t blame those people who think it’s foolish; people are losing their jobs and there is an air of uncertaintly in the country, the likes I’ve never seen.
But once in awhile you come across something that slaps you in the face and demands action. For everyone here at Libertad, it came in the form of a number.
6,285.
That is the number of people killed in Mexico’s drug war this last year. That number didn’t suprise me - it shocked me. Let’s do some quick math.
6285 divded by 12 = 523. 523 deaths a month. If you go further, that is about 17 murders a day.
Shocking? Hell yeah. But remember, with each of those deaths there are kids involved, there are families ripped apart, there are hearts broken and lives of the survivors totally destoryed.
Now, to bring this back to Libertad; What are we to do about this?
First, I know we can’t put a dent in the drug war. That isn’t our mission anyway. But what I feel we can do through Project Libertad is to help the kids (and some adults) living through this horror to not give up hope. Not only that, but through continuing to create narratives about situations like Mexico’s you bring light to a problem that still hovers in the dark.
I’ll end on this: I got an email from a young man living in San Diego that other day, asking us what the status of the project was (I hadn’t posted in awhile). He thought we’d probably quit “like all the rest.” It reminded me that projects like this take on a life of their own and people start to get inspired by the work, people that you might not know or ever hear from.
So I told him that we are not giving up, bad economy and all, and we will continue pushing until this project is fully realized. Now is not the time to quit.
Now is the time to push, and if we do, perhaps we might help the child who was destined to become #6,286.
More to come, and thanks for staying strong with us.
Pablo
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