She is an inspiration. This girl, this wonderful and courageous girl, began blogging at age 11 for BBC's Urdu site. She did what I am aspiring to do.
Malala took a good hard look at her narrow world to find out what was wrong with it and then she spoke. And people listened. And people understood.
This young Pakistani girl wrote about injustice and inspired a nation and made deadly enemies of the group she was criticizing, her oppressor, her nation's oppressor, the Taliban.
When she was 15, the world took her seriously enough that the Taliban considered her a major threat and shot her and, if I remember right, one of her friends while they were on the school bus on their way to school. But she survived and you know what? That girl just kept on writing. Damn...
She says that her book is a memoir to raise awareness about the millions of people, children among them, who are forced to abandon their potential under dictators after dictators who demand doublethink and unwavering loyalty and that violence is only dealt to those who deserve it, regardless of what you think you know...even if the violence is being dealt out to you.
If Malala Yousafzai is not an inspiration to you, if her message doesn't send you running towards your fears at full tilt while bellowing your most ghastly war cry, if her achievements do not leave you mouth dropped and your eyes burning, then it is already probably too late for you. You have probably been overcome by apathy, commercial mind-washing, mind-washing from a dictator, or some other form of debilitating mental illness. Because at 11 years old, Malala Yousafzai began to change the world by just combining and recombining scratches on paper and keys on a keyboard. What can we do?
More information: http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/malala-yousafzai/
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