Is Deprivation the Key to Empowerment?

So, tonight I'm stranded at OMNI Center due to the thunderstorm, and figured I may as well do work while I'm waiting for the lightning and rain to stop. (We bike to OMNI frequently.)

I've had yet another breakthrough in my understanding of capacity, and the SoS program in general. Lately, I've been racking my brains trying to figure out how to empower the team, and OMNI Center as a whole. Empowerment seemed to be a unicorn; quite fanciful, out of reach, and potentially a hoax.

Suddenly I realized what empowerment means: wanting something you deserve but can't have, and to be shown how to get it for yourself.

This could be civil rights.
This could be education.
Or it could be a green job.

Do we want green jobs, really? Have we fully, deeply, and comprehensively come to understand the deprivation we experience daily: our immediate need for money, being
forced to acquire money in unsustainable ways, use it to buy food that's almost poisonous, take jobs with no concern for us, other people or the planet...it goes on and on.

My swirl of confusion as to why SoS Fayetteville has at least double the resources and less than half the motivation of all the other cities may be caused by one simple oversight on my part: we don't really want green jobs, because we don't realize how much we need them.

We have television sets and cookies, how could American youth ever be deprived? For one thing, when presented with the tools of empowerment, they ignore them.

What does that say about our daily lives, if we can actually reach our dream but choose not to? Most of us are not faced each morning with horrible segregation, or prevented from voting, or beaten. A much more subtle yet destructive deprivation is going on inside our own heads, in moments when we purchase food, in moments when we apply for work. It's got very real consequences, and real solutions; but still we may choose to ignore them merely due to their subtlety.

When a youth becomes an entreprenuer, it's "extraordinary". When a youth succeeds in a career in acting, music, art, science, literature, you name it - this is considered a special case, a child prodigy, a gift from God just for him/her, or at best an ability that all other youth lack.

This is a lie.
There's a good book called TALENT IS OVERRATED by Geoff Colvin proving that this cultural misconception needs to stop. It's obviously disempowered too many of us.

Deprivation may be the foundation for empowerment.... but the key to empowerment is to want it.