Chris+K’s+2017+OpEd+Article

=The Loss of Self-Dependence=

When we are born, we greatly rely on others providing the things that we need to have in order to survive. But as we get older, we slowly are put into the position of having to provide for ourselves. The time on when we start to have to be self sufficient isn't written down anywhere, leading to thirty year old people living in their parents basements with no idea of how to survive in the real world. There can be many reasons for this situation or situations like this, but I think the most important reason is the learning person’s lack of motivation to get off their ass and provide for themself. Anyone can sit on the couch and get fed and entertained for the rest of their life at the expense of another person’s time and money. But only those taught well and those having the want to be self providing can succeed by themselves. Of course at the beginning of moving from others providing for you to self providing we might need a push, such as your parents threatening you to kick you out of the house, but most of us are able to make that leap, some more successful than others. Most people will need a little help in the beginning, but as a society we need to know the difference between helping someone out and doing everything for them. I think that my generation and other generations around it are relying on other people’s help way too much and I believe that this problem will only get worse throughout time unless we doing something to stop it. Yes people need help, but I think that for some of the things that we are doing currently we are helping to much and therefore hindering. Take homeless shelters for an example. First off, I respect homeless shelters and I’m not trying to say that they should be completely gotten rid of. But there are things about them that I think could improve. Most homeless shelters provide food and shelter to those in need of it (which you can find out about by just google searching “what do homeless shelters provide”. These people should only be coming to these shelters temporarily and should be moving from these shelters providing for them to self-dependence. Most shelters do not provide a way for people to improve their current situation into being self sufficient, leading to some, but not all, people just living off of the things a homeless shelter provides. My idea would be to install programs into every homeless shelter to provide jobs or other ways to help people get onto their feet and become self sufficient. This is happening in some places, but not all of them. To bring it back into a more relatable example take homework as an example. Those 10 pages of the Physiology packet due tomorrow are looking pretty hard. It would be easy to just ask a friend for a picture of all the pages and just copy those, but we need to stop doing this. Yes it will be hard, but in the end we will benefit more from it. A friend can help us find answers or explain things to us, but we should not be dependent on them. Another example is this Muckraker project. I had a hard time coming up with an idea for me to write about, so I asked my friends and one of them gave me the idea to write about this exact topic which is what I did. What I should have done instead is asked them for suggestions like “What really makes you mad?” or “What are you passionate about?”. Instead I just asked for a topic to write about and did it. The way I did this does not help me as much as the way I should have done it because the other way lets my brain grow into a more self dependent state instead of relying off of others ideas. I think that our society needs to do something drastic to change our views from what can we do to do the most with the least amount of effort to how can we help ourselves. Is this going to be hard to do? Yes. But if we can do this, our society could be full of people self dependent and willing to help others reach their level as well.