Author: Nina Hogan

The term leader is a very abstract broad term. Anyone can be a leader in every day life. I know for a fact I am a leader when it comes to every day life. This might sound conceited but being a leader also requires the confidence of knowing you are trying to make strives in your life and in anyone else’s life for a positive change. I consider myself a leader of my own life. I personally have gone through and immense amount of traumatic things in a short time period. This in essence doesn’t make me a leader however it goes to show you the lengths of what I am trying to reach to better my community so these things don’t happen to anyone else. I have been a victim of sexual assault, of a natural disaster that left me and my family homeless and losing friends and acquaintances I thought would be there with me for my whole life in a matter of six months. Yet I still wake up and have better goals for the future. One being now to educate people on the harmful affects that sexual violence has on a person. I plan on being an attorney in the near future and strive to help victims with representation. While also hoping to educate people on the dangers of this I also have a goal to help with individuals with disabilities. My brother has autism and he is nonverbal and can not communicate. There is this app that combats this issue where it is basically a talking app. It has icons and it has a verbal voice so that the person who can not communicate can speak. The issue with this technological application is that its basically 300$. My mom waited three to four years to purchase this app because she couldn’t afford it. I would like to create an application that anyone can use. A lot of autistic individuals come from lower class families and with this being such a high cost it is nearly impossible for them to pay for it. So hopefully longterm goal would be to try and advocate and/or create an application that is either not costly at all or minimum cost that the average every day person can pay for. I hope I can educate people on these topics as best as I can. I consider myself to be leader with the amount of times I have had to adapt to certain situations and how I always overcome them no matter what. So yes. I would say I am a leader.

The definition of change is to, “make (someone or something) different; alter or modify.” I think as a society we have indeed started and created a new change. For starters when looking simply at technology the advancements that have been made have only skyrocketed the past twenty years. It truly is funny to see how my mom who is only like 43 was still in the time of age where she needed a paper written she would have used a typewriter. While I only 19 was brought into the world right around the time technology was being enhanced throughout society as a whole. The change I want to create is to frankly get rid of outdated systems that have been known to systemically put minorities and marginalized communities in poverty. Although this change can not be done overnight I think it is important that we get rid of these insane problems. For instance that fire that killed I believe 17 people and 8 of them being children all because landlords do not adequately fix certain issues in public housing buildings. That right there has to stop. The news had reported that there was over 283 complaints on the property majority stemming from property issues. There was two individuals who said the fire alarms go off 3 to 4 times per day. That is outrageous. No wonder all those people died due to lack of adequate assistance.

Although it’s going to sound crazy I don’t believe credit should be used when purchasing an apartment complex or even a house. Only reason I say these things is because these measures are literally keeping people in inadequate living conditions. Although credit will most likely stay the system credit is used needs to change. I can apply for any credit card I want but because I don’t have enough credit I can’t receive one? Then all of those credit card denials guess what lower your score a point each. Yet I can pay a loan off for a year and my score will only raise one point? Credit is literally the enemy for poverty stricken individuals. You can’t get a car without credit, you can’t get an apartment without credit, you can’t get a house without credit. I know people who are homeless right now because they don’t have enough credit to get an apartment. The system would rather you accumulate all this debt in order to show your a “responsible” person that can pay it back. Who wins in this system? The people who have money. I simply wanna open some peoples eyes to show how the system is corrupt and only caters to white collar individuals and corporations. We see that clearly when the cdc changed their isolation period from 10 days to 5. They don’t care about working people they care about money.

We are the people. We supply these corporations with money. We work for low wages for these corporations. Plus we are getting poisoned with our food supply. Why is it that so much of our food is literally banned in other countries? Why is it that our obesity crisis is ongoing? Why is it so unrealistically expensive to even purchase ‘supposedly’ organic food. Why do we consistently agree to these horrid practices and standards? Why do we have to justify leaving a crappy job that doesn’t adequately support you to a less crappy job that still doesn’t adequately supports you? These are the questions that I have for literally everyone. You can give me all the excuses in the book of how it wouldn’t work but why hasn’t anyone just tried? Why is it that once we get out of college we can surpass 100k in debt. Why is this normal? This is not normal. College students can arise in all this debt and still have to work for corporations that don’t even give them livable wages. People would rather take an uber to the hospital rather than call an ambulance. Our life is more important than these unjust ways of living. Once people realize that this is not how we should be living change can and will occur. This is not normal. Yet corporations and the system creates it to be normalized with all of us. Change needs to be done and I will always promote the fight to live without unjust systems that just keeps making us poorer and stay in our class range.