A Quote by Joycelyn Elders

What I can do is to go out and talk about the problems and solutions, make people aware of the scope of the problems, get them to become advocates for a turnaround, and convince them to develop an action plan, targeted to their community, to deal with young people. [They need to] find out what the kids want to do - dances, midnight-basketball leagues.
When you travel and when you campaign, people tell you their problems. You see the problems and you become aware of them and you talk about them every day. And so you feel the responsibility for doing something about them.
Once you convince people that they're victims, you really own them because you've just told them that whatever problems they have in life, it's not their fault. And then you're telling them they can't fix them by themselves. Look at your life. Your life sucks. You're a victim of these people here, you can't fix it. You need us looking out for you. "Us" being the Democrat Party in this case, the people that go out and get votes.
When you get your self realization or your second birth you become entitled to an awareness by which you can find out the roots of everything. You can find out the roots why people get sick, you can find out why there are incurable diseases, you can find out why there are psychological problems, you can find out why there are moral crisises, you can find out why there are political problems, why there are economic problems.
People must be aware of their problems in a realistic way. They must be able to analyse their problems and to work out common solutions. In other words a community is easily divided when their perception of the same thing is different
When you manage people, you must first convince them they need managing. So you create the problems and then let the people cry for solutions.
Kids go to school; we develop them at school. We develop them later on in the workplace so that we get better quality individuals, so that we get less people that are dependent or get into problems.
Commit to growing yourself. Do not avoid problems and or complain about problems. Don't let them bother you. In fact, don't even call them problems; refer to them as "challenges" or "situations". Let go of the emotion and drama you create when you don't get what you want. Just stay present and handle one situation at a time with an open mind and an open heart. Trust yourself and in the universe that everything will work out in the end.
If you wait for people to come to you, you'll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don't realize they have one in the first place.
People don't want to see me having a bad morning. They have job problems, financial problems, family pressures, kids to get off to school. The last thing they want to wake up to is someone showing them the same problems. So maybe that's the one time I am forced to act.
What I like to do with music is make people feel better. Make people realize that all humans have the same problems, more or less. A lot of people deal with the same thing. A lot of times people think problems are specific to them and they if they hear a song about a problem common to them, they feel good because they know that someone else has gone through it.
We have to let young people know that we care about them and their future. I want to involve them to a level where they become the leaders and the advocates because, right now, a lot of these young people don't believe they have an advocate.
There's much talk about the problems of youth, but young people are not a problem. It's a natural evolution of things. We, who have known only how to make war and slaughter people, have no right to judge them, nor can we teach them anything.
It doesn't take any effort to dream. It's a lot easier than looking at the problems in front of you and figuring out what you're going to do about them. But all you're doing is putting your problems up on a shelf for later, right? That doesn't make them go away.
When people come to you with problems or challenges, don't automatically solve them. As a mama bear, you want to take care of your cubs, so you tend to be protective and insulate them against all those things. But if you keep solving problems for your people, they don't learn how to actually solve problems for themselves, and it doesn't scale. Make sure that when people come in with challenges and problems, the first thing you're doing is actually putting it back to them and saying: "What do you think we should do about it? How do you think we should approach this?".
I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.
I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way, I’ve seen people withdraw, I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them. What we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.
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