In the spring of 2006, Global Harmony
Through
Personal Excellence, Inc. held it's 19th annual Celebration of
Youth
essay contest. The essay theme was "justice, " and this was the essay question:
Below are the first place essays. Find the names of all
winners and honorable mentions to the right.
Saquonté Wilkinson, Elementary Division
PIcture this. It is a bright sunny April day around 2:00 pm. All of htekids are out of school because it is Saturday and they are on their way to the Benning Parks Playground. The children of all ages rush in to play their favorite games; kickball, baseketball, hopscotch, baseball, soccer and jump rope. Wow, everyone is having so much fun! Then all of a sudden a teenager walks over to the wall on the playground. I wonder what he is going to do? Some other teenagers follow him. Then they picked up what looked like trash or a newspaper off the ground and then they pulled out some drugs! Yuk! They used the dirty newspaper to roll their "weed." Then they begin smoking the drugs in front of the children standing and playing aroundn the recreational center.
I think it is an injustice for drug dealers to roam the streets of American soil and use and sell drugs. The drug dealers will sell drugs to kids by pretending that the drugs are candy. For example, they buy a candy bar, throw the candy away, but keep the wrapper. Then they shape the weed like a candy bar and wrap it back in the candy wrapper. Next they sell the candy to children. Then children buy the candy not knowing that they are buying weed. By the time that the kids discover that they have been tricked, the kids run back, but the drug dealer is gone.
The drug dealers are making children dig their own graves because many of them then start experimenting and using drugs. The children don't know what they are doing. They think that is fun to do drus. They don't realize that they are destroying their brains and bodies and this may be causing them to die.
I believe that parents have to help protect their children any way they can. Children should be supervised when they are playing on the playground by people who love and care for them. They should also be escorted to the stores so parents can see what they are buying. I know that parents are concerned about their children, but they must do a better job of protecting them from drug dealers. Parents must remember to talk to their children about the dangers of drugs. Always remember that children are the greatest treasures of life and we must protect them from the injustices of drug dealers.
Flannery Fitzgerald, Junior High Division
The big glass doors to the lobby of Friendship Hospital for Animals swung open. in rushed a police officer with a bloody and torn up pit bull in her arms. She ran to the front desk and told the receptionist that the pitbull had been in a fight with another dog -- a fight started by their owners. My Mom and I were sitting in the lobby waiting room. I was about seven years old, horrified and confused. This had not just been a random fight between two dogs. People had provoked innocent animals and gotten them hurt just to amuse themselves for a few minutes. They may even have done it for money, getting their friends to place bets, my Mom said.
A routine check-up for my dog, Chipsy, became a lesson on just how cruelly some peole treat animals.
I had always loved animals and knew that some people mistreat them, but until that day, I never realized just how inhumane peole can be. Now I am aware of the many things we do that are unkind not only to pets, but to lab animals, farm animals and wildlife.
What some people don't realize is that we share our Earth with these creatures. They provide us with companionship, knowledge, food and the joy of nature. They were on this planet long before humans. In fact, many of us believe we evolved from them. Yet, after all they do for us, we still mistreat them.
Every year thousands of animals are killed because we test our medicines and unnecessary beauty products on them. Millions are killed because people decide they don't want their pets any more, and animal shelters cannot afford to keep them alive when no one else will take them. A lot of animals die because people with no imaginations cannot find anything better to do than provoke animals and make them fight each other. Still more perish when we ruin their habitat by building houses and roads and polluting the environment. Countless farm animals suffer under stressful, unnatural conditions, because we care more about them producing and making money for us than about their wellbeing.
Back when we did not have many types of materials to make clothes out of, we would kill animals and use their skins to stay warm. Now we have many things to keep us warm and plenty of faux fur, and we are still killing animals so we can look fashionable and cool. We don't need the ivory and other things poachers take, but they wouldn't stay in business if people weren't buying it. We need to spread the word: Wearing fur and ivory is definitely not cool, no matter who you are and how much money you have.
We certainly have plenty to worry about with all the injustices done to our fellow human beings that we see and read about every day. But we must not forget animals. "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot," said the 19th century writer Mark Twain. To be truly intelligent and moral, we need to do right by animals.
