Charity!

I've decided to encourage people to contribute to the Black Expo. As a white dude, this might seem a little weird and perhaps intrusive to a predominately black event. I've never even been to the Black Expo. But the Black Expo intrigues me because it looks like a great opportunity for blacks and people of other races to join together and look at how America can be better shaped for equality.
It is not a secret that many blacks are disadvantaged at a young age: "The poverty rate of Indiana Black youth, ages 0-17 is 152% greater than the poverty rate of the total youth population in Indiana". This is an appalling statistic - how is America supposed to be equal when people can't even start on equal playing fields? There's tons of more statistics that show that blacks have disadvantages in society. Who's fault this is is unimportant, but what is important is that everybody has an equal opportunity in America and the Black Expo looks like a good opportunity for acquiring information on this.

Cora!

Blog – Is Cora Tucker successful? By what definition?

Cora Tucker is successful because she believes she is. In some aspects her measure of success is very similar to the ones presented by Emerson. Emerson proposed that self-reliance is success - and that defines Cora Tucker. From her disadvantaged beginnings to her role as a community leader, she has become successful by being confident in her abilities. But, her success can also be attributed to her work with (and helping) other people - an antitheses of Emerson's views. I think that Tucker has taken the best of multiple views of success and achieved them all - she's self-reliant, she's a humanitarian, she's made a huge impact on her community, and she's happy. Perhaps the only form of success she hasn't achieved is the one of material objects, and anyone with an ounce of decency in their heart can say that this is the least important form of success. Cora Tucker is very successful.

Successful

Blog – What is Emerson saying it takes to be successful? Do you agree? Is it that easy

Emerson says to be successful you must be confident (even arrogant), non-conforming, unapologetic, inconsistent, misunderstood, self-sufficient, truthful, solitary, a non-traveler, unique, and you must be yourself. Basically, Emerson says that to be successful you have to do what you want to do and not worry about what other people think. He seems to be very anti-society and anti-government based upon his writing. Emerson suggests that society is the cause for so many people being unsuccessful and that to be successful one must not conform to the standards of society and no apologize about it either. Uniqueness, being yourself, is what Emerson believes is the key ingredient to success. He also adds some random ideas into the equation as well, such as not being a traveler.
I don't agree with Emerson for one reason: many people become succesful by building off of other people's ideas. "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" (George Santayana). The inverse of this quote works as well: those who pay attention to history are likely to build upon it. Otherwise, I think that Emerson's ideas are spot-on (except for his random blurb about not traveling). People get too caught up in society's definition of success - a house, a car, a family, etc. that they miss out on the real success - being yourself.
Becoming successful is not easy. By Emerson's standards it's a ginormous task: dismiss all those years of society's definition of success being pounded into you. Learning how to feel successful without much physical proof (i.e. material objects) is not easy. Becoming any of the things that Emerson says that it takes to be successful is counter-intuitive, natural (based on society being natural - which it is for most people), and therefore, difficult.