ESSAY CONTESTS www.TheCitizensWhoCare.org 1st Annual "Through My Eyes" Essay Contest Winners A booklet called Through My Eyes contains all 22 essays and is available for $5.00 at Words & Pictures, 407 Oak Street, Brookings, OR 97415. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this booklet go to support these contests. Grand Prize Winner First Runner Up Second Runner Up Third Runner Up Fourth Runner Up Background Grand Prize Winner - Jason Bay Part of being a teenager is learning how to deal with peer pressure. I'm sure that just about everybody has been offered alcohol by one of their friends, but the true test is if and how you turn them down. I have been offered alcohol on numerous occasions, and have turned down the offer each time. Personally, I disagree with under age drinking. This is just my opinion, but I have many reasons for it. I feel that there are better things to do with my time than to go get drunk and party. There are too many things to worry about while you're in high school. From experience thus far I know that your senior will be the busiest of all school years just because of all of the college stuff that you have to worry about. Filling out application after application can be a major drag. Why throw away all of those opportunities by getting drunk with your friends some night and getting in trouble for it? High school students should be focused on what they want their futures to be like, which hopefully isn't turning into some drunk. The most effective thing that I have found against fighting peer pressure in general is to not be around those situations in the first place. Why even put yourself in a situation that can damage your reputation and your eligibility for sports? The other thing that I have found is that your true friends will never pressure you to do anything that you don't want to do. I try not to become close friends with anybody that I feel will try to pressure me to do something that I don't want to do. Yes, you will probably lose many friendships this way, but those people probably weren't good friends anyways. If there's one thing that I try to do, it's to make decisions on my own. Peer pressure is just some hyped up word that has such a negative connotation because it's usually used when talking about drugs or alcohol. Things like this shouldn't affect you; make decisions on your own. If you get into trouble, make sure you're accountable for a decision that you made. Don't let your supposed friends talk you into something you don't want to do. First Runner Up - Dee Dee Christensen "Hey, who wants a drink?" "Oh come on, just one drink won't hurt you. It's fun." "It's cool. Everybody drinks, right?" These are examples of what a peer might say to persuade you to try some alcohol. It's called peer pressure. Kids feel the need to be included and popular, therefore they accept the alcohol. Yet, what they don't realize is that the choices they make today will affect the rest of their lives. Alcohol is a combination of fruits, vegetables and grain that has been fermented. Fermentation is a process in which sugars from food are changed into alcohol. Alcohol has many uses such as an antiseptic or a sedative. It is very useful in many products. Yet, drinking alcohol is a depressant. It greatly slows down the central nervous system and prevents some messages from reaching the brain. It alters a person's vision, memory, perception, movement and hearing. Drinking small amounts of alcohol results in a relaxed and calm state, but too much alcohol can result in intoxication. People who abuse alcohol lose their coordination, slur their speech and delay their reaction time. Drinking and driving leads to hundreds of deaths each year. When large amounts of alcohol are consumed in a short time period, alcohol poisoning can occur. The body has become poisoned by the amount of alcohol, and the first sign is vomiting. Other symptoms include extreme tiredness, unconsciousness, difficulty in breathing, seizures and even death. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, about 80% of high school students have tried alcohol. Alcohol experimentation is common in the teen years. Kids decide to drink because of curiosity, to relax, the need to fit in, or to feel older. Movies show drinking as all right, satisfying and glamorous. Advertising messages show that drinking alcohol all the time is okay. Parents are also a number one reason why kids try drinking. They may have easy access to alcohol and their parents act "cool" when using alcohol socially. Alcohol seems harmless to teens. Recognizing the dangers of alcohol can prevent an individual from drinking. Teens believe everyone else has tried drinking, but that's not true. Not drinking keeps you healthy and out of harms way. Alcohol abuse can lead to criminal records, health problems like obesity, unwanted pregnancies, car crashes, homicides and even suicide. Resisting the temptation to drink will pay off in the end. You may not be popular or have the same friends, but not drinking will help you make better life decisions. Research has proven that teens who exhibit good decisions while they're young make better choices later in life. Drinking can lead to bad habits. Participating in a sport or acquiring a new hobby can take your mind off peer pressure. You can meet new friends that share your view. Deciding whether to drink is a personal decision that we each eventually have to make. Hopefully we can all make the right one, not to drink. alcohol and their Second Runner Up - Anonymous Hi, I am a seventeen year-old senior at BHHS, and I have had to deal with alcohol for most of life. Even though I have never drank, most of the experiences have been sobering and will most likely keep me that way for the remainder of my life. There is only one that I am going to tell you about today, and so the tale begins... When I was four my mother married my stepfather. He was the father of her third child, and she hoped to provide a stable home and environment for all of her family. He was a good man, at first, who taught me many things. It wasn't until after his accident that he became abusive. For four more years I endured his physical and verbal abuse that were the result of his drinking and remorse over the loss of his functionality to the family. I endured to the very day that my mother divorced him, but the story doesn't end here. In fact, it skips further ahead another two years. For you see, my mother stopped all visitation between my stepfather and my sister out of fear that he would abuse her just as he did us. She said that it was until he lightened up on the drinking and had a safe place to stay. Finally that day came, but of course it wasn't one of pleasure for me. I hated the man, but, for my sister, it was one of joy. She loved her father and never once had been hurt by him. I had to go along to make sure that nothing happened with my sister. When we arrived at his friend's house, where he was straying, everything was cheery (he ever looked better than he did before his accident) and my sister began to be with her father. The visit was very nice. He had cut back on his drinking and was very congenial. It wasn't until the trip back that things began to get scary. On the trip home has was so angry that he had such little time with us and that he had to drive three hours to bring us back that he began to drink. As the trip progressed and he had drank more and more, his driving abilities became impaired. He would drift into other lanes, speed into merging traffic, and other terrifying mistakes. When I finally had to turn the wheel to stop us from hitting the dividing barrier on a sharp turn, I gave up. I told him that I had to go to the bathroom, and he promptly pulled over at a gas station. I got out and called my older sister, telling her where we were. I then went and took the keys from the ignition, hiding them so that we couldn't leave. Then we waited. Soon enough, my sister arrived and picked us up. As we drove away, he didn't even dare to look at us, knowing that he had done wrong again and blown his chance of seeing us in the future. This, among many events, has shown me what alcohol can do to a person. It can ruin situations and take lives. If I hadn't have been paying attention to what was going on around me, I am not sure that I would be here to write this up. In the use of moderation, I realize that it can be an enjoyable thing. Fortunately for me, I have the choice of whether or not I want to use it. I don't ever want to be the one on the other side of any child, yelling and screaming. Alcohol is a person's right to use, but I personally detest the substance in all forms. It ruined my childhood and robber a little girl of her father. No one deserves having those injustices wrought upon them. Third Runner Up - Anonymous Another mindless, meaningless essay that may score me some temporary publicity in the local newspaper. Sweet. I can watch television, eat Hot Pockets, file some tax returns, and write this essay at the same time. And pick out my outfit tomorrow. Killer. All right, let me just get out the assignment...and the $64,000 topic is...oh. Oh, it's---it's...alcohol. So this essay topic is a bit heavier than the others. All right, who am I kidding, to me the word alcohol is like a blow to the stomach. Just the word alone brings back gut wrenching, fleeting flashbacks of my abnormal childhood and the reminder that my family is broken, my relatives are missing or dead, and my psyche is permanently scarred...because of alcohol. Because of a single product regularly distributed in Oregon, and throughout the U.S., like it's no big deal; like it's just a normal drink--in fact, an incredible drink, that enables you to party like it's 1999 and never remember who exactly you knocked up last night, or how ugly she was. An incredible drink, than ruined my life...and I've never even tasted it. Going back to those days now is harder than it used to be. After spending so long trying to block them out, they've become sort of a blur of manic yelling and being left on my own. My father left the house when I was 6, and I was to stay here in Brookings with my mother...who, which I wouldn't figure out for a number of years, was a raging alcoholic. I know it's hard to understand, but when you're little and an only child, and the only concept of social interaction is your mother stumbling around the house eternally screaming at you for no reason, you can't grasp the concept of alcoholism, and things don't turn out right. Don't get me wrong. I lived in a huge house, had lots of pets, and friends would come over every so often to play with me. I was well off. But it never really made up for the fact that my mother was really the only person that I had in the world, and she was never, ever there. Bottle after bottle of white wine would pour into glass after glass, and she and her friends would be completely wasted by 5 pm. I would ask for things or try to tell a story about what happened in my day, and all I would get in response was a string of expletives or complete ignorance coupled with unexplainable manic laughter. I went on thinking it was completely normal, and lay in bed ever night ignoring the sounds of breaking glass downstairs and the rabid banging on my bedroom door late every night. But as I grew up, it got worse and worse. Friends stopped being able to come to my house, by their parents' orders. I couldn't really ask my mother to drive me anywhere, for fear that we'd instantly wreck. So I grew up one of the infinite amount of teenagers in Brookings that are forced to raise themselves, because their parents fall victim--or shall I say, choose to fall victim--to alcohol. No matter how many times I screamed at her to stop drinking, no matter how many jugs of wine I emptied into the sink, there was nothing I could do, so I eventually gave up. But it killed me; it killed me to go through ever day to a virtually empty house crying myself to sleep knowing that the incoherent incompetent woman downing bottles of wine downstairs might have actually been my mother once. What got me the most, though, wasn't that she annoyed me to death. It wasn't that I'd come home from school with my mother nowhere to be found, forced to clean the puddles of blood from her theoretically self inflicted injuries gathered around the house. It was that she didn't know me, that she didn't remember what I did one day to the next. The cool, exciting things that would happen to me--and the worst. The sickest, most horrible things could happen to me with her there, right in the room. And she would never remember. And that--that is what I will never forgive her for. Despite the twisted nature of this story, it does have a vaguely happy ending; a little over a year ago I gathered up the courage to leave the house for two months, giving my mother the ultimatum of getting clean or forcing me to stay out forever. And she did it--she sobered up, she joined AA, and she found a good boyfriend who's part of the counseling office. I'm one of the lucky ones--never did I imagine she'd gather the willpower to beat the alcoholism, but miraculously, she did it. But it will never make things right. I met my mother for the first time a year ago when I came back home. Since then, it's been strange...like living with a new roommate I thought I might have seen once before. Living on my own has forced me to become independent, and disregard any presence of a guardian figure in my life. It's caused me to be quick to judge, to take charge of situations, and hate anyone who chooses to have their mind clouded by alcohol of their own free will. The drink has ruined my life. It broke up my parents, it took my mother from me, my uncle from me, and my aunt from me, and most recently it showed strikingly similar effects in my ex-boyfriend's family. Which brings me to the fact that nearly ever single teenager I know in Brookings lives in a family seriously and negatively impacted by alcohol. We all have our own horrible stories about being left alone, or beaten, or put through horrible dysfunctional situations. Leave it to someone who's usually apathetic to tell you--to yell it in your face--that yes, Brookings does have an alcohol problem. A very serious alcohol problem. But if I can do something...you can too. Fourth Runner Up - Jessalyn Breen My uncle was only thirteen when he was diagnosed as an alcoholic. It took just one sip of beer to get him hooked. This sweet-faced, chubby boy named Kevin was the youngest of seven children. His family was raised Catholic. They loved him almost as much as he loved them. It was customary to see Kevin playing hopscotch with his sisters or racing on bikes with his brothers. He was a good student and fair citizen. Suddenly Kevin changed. He began sneaking off late at night, driving without a license, and stealing from his aunt and uncle's liquor cabinet. He was addicted. He was obsessed. Fortunately, his parents weren't blind. They noticed Kevin's behavior and sent him to an alcohol rehabilitation center. Unfortunately, their attempts were futile. Over the next three decades, Kevin would check in and out of rehab centers twelve times. He dropped out of school, and was unable to hold a job, friend, girlfriend, or even sit through an AA meeting very long. His family was exasperated. It seemed that everything they tried failed. Even the threat of death could not cure Kevin. In one instance, he entered the hospital facing a zero percent chance of surviving, miraculously pulled through it, and drank again within three weeks. Today Kevin is in jail for crimes he committed while under the influence of alcohol. I haven't seen him for five years. Yet he still has influence over me. After watching his life go to shambles due to alcohol, I have vowed never to drink. I know that the risks are too devastating. I know how much harm he has done to his family. I hope that others realize that when they drink, they are holding not only their own life in their hands, but many others as well. Contact Us for information regarding future Contests. TheCitizensWhoCare.org was developed and is maintained by Gordon Clay Through My Eyes™ is a registered trademarks of Gordon Clay ©2007-2011, www.TheCitizensWhoCare.org/brookings/throughmyeyeswinners.html