Motivation shmotivation

I am learning the definition of irony...

When I was in high school, the motivation for making good grades was to please my parents - that and, as I was continuously reminded, without good grades, I couldn’t get into a good college, which meant I couldn’t get into a good grad school and would never get a good job. So I did my work and made good grades - but not great grades. Nope, I was never the kid who had straight A's - I had plenty of B's and the occasional C. Apparently, getting into a good college was not quite enough of a motivation – but good SAT scores and a good interview opened the doors to Purdue University and off I went.

Surely the red-brick buildings of Purdue University would motivate me to get good grades. After all, without good grades, I would never get into a good grad school and couldn’t get a good job. Once again, I did my work - once again, I made the same grades. It seemed even the prospect of a marginal grad school would not motivate this boy to work. Thanks to the GRE and a great interview though, the doors to the hallowed halls of Stanford opened up and I was off to California.

Last chance to make good grades - The Leland Stanford Junior University. Surely a kid who nobody expected would ever make it here could find the motivation to make the grades everyone knew he was capable of. Don’t forget, without good grades in grad school, I would never get a good job! Nope - not even that did it. I had decent grades at Stanford just like I had at Purdue and in high school. Now I had gone and done it – why would NASA ever consider hiring someone like me? Because for some reason, the interviewer decided I was worth it and everyone else agreed. Lucky me.

Eighteen years of education, and I never once found the motivation to always go to class, always finish my homework and always study for examinations. Yet somehow the fates smiled on me and here I am with the type of job everyone always warned me I needed good grades to get.

I’m taking classes in preparation for applications to med school right now. I’ll take the MCAT next summer, so having finished eight hours of Biology at the UH this summer, I’m now taking Organic chemistry and Genetics to be followed by Anatomy and Physiology in the spring. For the first time in my life, I am finishing all my homework, attending all my classes and acing all my tests. Motivation has never been easier to come by because now I have something dire to work for – without good grades I won’t get into med school and I’ll have to keep this “great” job I have :-)

Forty days later...

On September 29th at 5pm, the Houston Coalition for Life’s ’40 Days for Life’ campaign officially came to a close. During the forty days leading up to the 29th (excluding Sundays), HCfL had at least one person outside the Planned Parenthood clinic at all times praying and keeping vigil. The lead up to this event was a very public one with HCFL promising to overwhelm the clinic with protestors, ‘prayer warriors’ and ‘sidewalk counselors.’ In response, Planned Parenthood put out the call to its volunteers and requested additional support from old and new escorts so that clientele could be shielded from the protestors during all operating hours. The result was overwhelming – 141 escorts provided 1400 hours of volunteer escorting during the forty day campaign. Money poured in to provide the escorts with water and refreshments during the hot late summer hours and after all was said and done, an average of between one and four HCfL protestors maintained a vigil during which the number of volunteer escorts far exceeded the number of protestors.

So a major movement by HCfL spurred Planned Parenthood to recruit hundreds of new volunteer escorts, most of whom found the work so rewarding they have decided to stay on and continue escorting. HCfL on the other hand had trouble convincing even their normal quarry of protestors to come out and with the ’40 Days’ campaign over, they are now more overwhelmed than ever by new escorts who protect the clientele from the lies, hateful insults and abusive pictures which are the tools of HCfL. Tonight, Planned Parenthood held a social hour to thank its escorts for the work they do and listening to the statistics which I witnessed firsthand, I have never been more proud to be a volunteer escort.

The terrible reality is that there is a place for organizations like HCfL – I respect what they are trying to do, even if I disagree with it…but they must be the most horribly mismanaged organization in the world. Rather than respectfully education women of the alternatives to abortion, most of their protestors use scare tactics and insults to try to get the women to turn around, a method I have never seen work. The few protestors who actually respect the women enough to talk to them as opposed to yelling and lying to them are then shunned by the clientele because they see the tactics of their colleagues and assume they are all alike. Someone intelligent and sensitive needs to take over that organization and overhaul its methods which are obviously not working considering that Planned Parenthood of Houston is now expanding to a new, larger facility for the third time in twenty years.

Perhaps the most telling story of how poorly managed HCfL is came from a letter Planned Parenthood received from the mother of a client. She explained that her daughter was in need of a non-abortion related procedure and had been told by Planned Parenthood that it would cost her $500. She had saved up the money and gone to Planned Parenthood. Upon arriving, a HCfL protestor intercepted her and asked why she was there. When the young lady told her, she explained that she could have the same procedure done at the Medical Center for $100. The young lady, clearly not the most responsible type, happily left and went shopping where she spent $400 before heading to the Medical Center to make an appointment for her procedure. It was there that she learned the Medical Center charges $1000. She returned home in tears and told her mother what had happened. Her mother called Planned Parenthood who told the woman to bring in her daughter and they would find a way to cover the extra $400 expense.

It is incidences like these which drain the public’s respect of anti-choice organizations like HCfL. Planned Parenthood exists not because it provides abortions but because it provides other health related services. Consider that 91% of Planned Parenthood’s business has nothing to do with abortion and any intelligent person would quickly come to the conclusion that the way to shut Planned Parenthood down is not to spend millions of dollars hiring protestors and ‘sidewalk counselors’ (yes – many of HCfL’s protestors are actually paid to do what they do). The way to shut Planned Parenthood down is to open up a clinic next door that provides every non-abortion related service at a lower price! And as for the protestors - it doesn’t take forty protestors to hand out literature and inform a woman about alternatives…it takes one. Send the other 39 to Crisis Pregnancy Clinics to volunteer there and help drive down their prices so they can compete with Planned Parenthood.

With emotions running as high as they are about abortion, the anti-choice movement has to be one of the best funded movements in America. Watching organizations like HCfL squander money so fruitlessly, if I were anti-choice I would be furious.

Rubbish

I took my trash out this morning - not a particularly noteworthy event except that it was the first time in eight days. Ever since moving downtown, I have become a recycling fiend - there is a recycling center a few blocks away which has drop offs for just about every material you can think of - paper, cardboard, aluminum, other metals, glass, plastic bottles, plastic bags, Styrofoam - you name it, they accept it. The only things I end up throwing away are fruit peels and used napkins - both of which biodegrade quickly in your average landfill - and now it takes me about a week to fill up a medium garbage bag.

I'm not writing this to boast - I'm writing it to say that it really is possible to reduce the amount of waste you produce by an order of magnitude with very little effort on your part. The facilities exist and they are horrendously underused. Can you imagine a world in which all we throw away are fruit peels and used napkins? I couldn't before, but now I can.