My First LTE

This is a letter to the editor for a local newspaper in American Samoa I wrote in response to an article written by one of my new favorite people, Amata Aumua. She is currently running for Congresswoman of American Samoa against the incumbent, Congressman Eni Faleomavaega. Her article can be found here: http://www.amata.as/cgi-data/news/files/284.shtml


Dear Editor,


This is a response to Amata’s Pacific Notebook titled “Bread and Circuses” published on January 10th. As a young adult who was born and reared on the islands of Samoa and am currently pursing a graduate degree, I feel a need to throw my two cents in. I stumbled on Ms. Aumua’s Pacific Notebook article online and digested what I thought was a fresh breath of progressive ideas for the New Year. I have a deep love and respect for the Samoan way of life. To many, this way of life is considered simple and compared to the unyielding and sometimes unforgiving competitions of life that was mentioned in the article, I would agree without hesitation that this is true.

As Ms. Aumua pointed out, those in professional sports should be highly acclaimed for their accomplishments in making a name for themselves and putting Samoans on the map, especially with football. However, athletic accomplishments should not be the only thing prized in our society; not when a huge majority of college athletes do not go on to play professional sports. We all know the advertisement the NCAA plays during commercials of big sporting events. It goes like, “90% of our athletes become pro in something other than sports”. Although it is unknown how accurate that number is, it is substantial enough for us to enlighten the future college athletes from Samoa to have a definitive back up plan. This comes in the form of their education.

Mentioned in the article was a Samoan college student from San Francisco who wondered why our culture emphasized achievements in sports at the expense of other achievements, especially in academia. My question is who does the Samoan youth look to for aspirations and guidance in pursuing the arts or the sciences or in becoming a CEO of a major company or a professor at our country’s elite institutions? I found this quite difficult in that for most of my formal education, I did not have a mentor who looked, talked, and understood my island roots. This is not surprising in that I am entering a profession in the United States in which Samoans are poorly represented. I guess the task at hand should be to get more of our people into these positions of leadership who can inspire and instill thought into those of the coming generation.

Speaking of generations, every spring sees students from high school that all have important decisions to make in creating a world with their footprints on it. My opinion on sports should not negate any aspirations of our island’s students in becoming student athletes in college. In contrast, I am trying to highlight an important point that Ms. Aumua expressed in her article. The fact remains that our world is complex and challenging and highly competitive. This brings to mind an article written in the New York Times earlier this year about girls at some of the best public high schools in the United States. As a product of the feminist movement and being told all their lives that they can become anything they wanted to, they not only are the best students of their class at the best public high school in the country, but they are also well versed in different languages, can play musical instruments, are considered competitive enough to be recruited as a college athlete, act in plays, and have enough time to even be leaders in their church youth group. The list of achievements of these young individuals are extensive but what’s daunting here is that these impressive resumes still may not be enough to get into the elite colleges of America because there are thousands of these prototypes. The youth of today no longer sit on the sidelines. They are out taking charge of their future no matter what age, sex or race they are and the competition to get into the “Harvards” or the “M.I.Ts” or law school or medical school is getting stiffer and stiffer. These kids are out there because they have people telling them their whole lives that anything is possible and that any goal is attainable and that being only an athlete is just not good enough. The whole package is now needed to succeed, whatever package that may be.

Ms. Aumua’s article drove home an important theme that needs to be addressed and that is to better equip our youth for their future. For most of my life, I was also an athlete and had a very difficult time as a kid deciphering whether education or sports was more important. This decision was ultimately up to me to make but what infuriated me as a high school student was a teacher who unjustly presumed that because I was an athlete, I did not have to worry about my grades in school. I felt I was placed in the “dumb jock” category automatically by a person who was supposed to mentor and encourage athletes to not only pursue but also excel in both sports and academics. Instead, she closed off the idea that maybe one day after my time as a college athlete had expired, I would be interested in getting into medical school to become a doctor. Now in this profession grades really do matter.

As I look back to that time when I was in the middle of high school and not really knowing where and what my future was going to lie in, I did take those words to heart. But this teacher's ignorance of the importance to strive for excellence in education now just reminds me daily of how essential it is for Samoa’s youth to “stand on the shoulders of mentors” as Ms. Aumua puts it. The more variety of mentors they have, the more options they get for their future in knowing that there are many, many fields to pursue other than the ones filled with grass and painted lines.

Sincerely,

An inspired student