unfortunate side effects of education

I value education more than I can put into words. I deeply believe in this idea of human capital that we have talked about in my social work class. It is essentially the quality of people in the form of knowledge, experience, skills, and personal character (courage, determination, etc).  I can see a huge difference in the way I think and the way I see people since I've been in college. I think a lot of that has to do with the events of the last 3 years and the people I have been around since moving to Muncie, but I think the biggest part is the classes I've taken and this journey I've been on to find what I am passionate about.
This semester in particular, I've been finding that I am passionate about social justice and equality. I've also discovered that this terrifies me. Because of the amount of intolerance we Americans have of people who aren't like us. This intolerance, ignorance of other groups of people, and avoidance of issues we don't understand is so destructive.  The more I read about Trayvon Martin, the debate about women's reproductive rights, and the way the GLBT community is treated the more angry I get.  Especially as I watched the movie "For the Bible Tells Me So" earlier today.  It's a documentary about conservative Christian parents and how they dealt with having a gay or lesbian child.  I went to a super conservative church during high school, and it took me a couple of years after high school to realize that there is so much of what I was taught there that I don't agree with at all. And now I feel like I can only see church as an institution whose traditional beliefs and dedication to the teachings of the Bible manipulates and oppresses people. Not to say that there is no value in church or in Christians, because there was a reason why I spent so many years in the church and why all of my closest friends are Christians. I have just come to this place in my education and life experience of profound bitterness to tradition and rules and being told what to believe.

 I am starting to understand that the downside of becoming more educated is that you see other perspectives than the uneducated world does.  Then your burden becomes educating others, even though a lot of people are not interested in a different perspective. So I guess for now, I will continue to get angry about injustice and intolerance and hopefully learn to have courage and advocate for equality.

dreams

New semesters always mean that you have to talk about your future (career) goals.  I tend to avoid thinking about the future because it's scary.  However, tonight I have let myself wonder what I would enjoy doing for a while. 
Lately I have been throwing around the idea of working at a soup kitchen. And I realized after writing some things about myself for a teacher, that I really enjoy food.  And then I wondered how great it would be to teach people about nutrition and be able to provide them with healthy food and the knowledge of its importance and how to prepare it. 
But then I stop my thinking and wonder what kind of schooling that would require, if I would actually enjoy it, and if I could even find/start a program to do that. 
And then I want to just forget about it and settle with doing something like working in a food bank, which I probably wouldn't enjoy at all.
Why is it so hard to let myself dream? To believe that I have power and influence and can make the world better for the people around me?

It's a scary thing, to dream.  What if you fail?