A call to action

I find myself in a foreign land sitting next to a Pakistani, Burmese, Irish, and two other Americans drinking Singha (tastes like Busch Heavy). These people have made the deliberate choice to travel to Thailand and dedicate their lives to bettering the lives of others...Human Rights. They will be writing their thesises on anything from Honor Killings to Starvation, Military Intervention to Women Rights. However it seems that is where the perverbial buck stops. They talk about awarness, books, and the good they can do about spreading knowledge about their respective causes. Now, these people are incredibly smart and had to go through a lot in order to even be accepted into this school. We all know that I am just some ex-salesman from Nebraska who has never claimed to be bright let alone have the warewithall to hold a conversation with these guys. Awareness is key to any cause which is a given (remember marketing major). But being aware of something does not change it, knowledge may be power but it is not change, this world is full of knowledgable authors what its missing is passionate actors. A thesis, a book, a marketing campaign is all great but in the end somebody has to act on your words...why can't you act on them?
The word hipocrite has a bad connotation to it but I believe that we are all hipocrites we are just to selfish to see it. I think of how many times I held the torch for the Omaha Children's Hospital: meetings, pamphlets, presentations, etc. all in the name of awareness of our cause at Dance Marathon. I remember being incredibly upset at family and friends for not giving or not giving enough to a cause that I was so passionate about. But how many visits did I make to the hospital itself (1), how many children did I bring a simple little present for, what good is words and money without a call to action. Letters in a book that accumulate into sentences and a supposed cause are about as good as me trying to order food from a Thai restaurant: I will eventually get my order in but who knows what they will bring me or what the outcome will be.

I will keep you updated on my travels, we are headed into Bangkok tomorrow to visit the embassy and to see what I can do about a Visa.

Here's to you,
Ryan, Junior, Husband, Brother, Michaud, Billy the Kid