<p>Please score my SAT essay out of 12.</p>
<p>Prompt: Should people take more responsibility for solving problems that affect their communities or the nation in general?</p>
<p>Written in 25 minutes:</p>
<p>As Abraham Lincoln once said, The Nation is the individual. Change is initially started by one person, and the best way to ensure change is to do it yourself. When one is faced with a problem it is wise to act on your own and not rely or expect other larger entities to fix it. History has a giant backlog of success stories of individuals getting what they want, or what they want changed, done. People should take more responsibility for solving problems that affect their communities, rather than relying on the nation as a whole.
A recent example of this is the former North Korean prisoner Shin Dong Hyuk. Shin is the only person to be born inside of a North Korean concentration camp, large hundred acre centers where thousands of people live in inhumane and brutal conditions, and escape. In fact, he is thought to be the only successful defector or a North Korean prison camp. In an example like this it is obvious why Shin did not rely on his government to ever give him a non-inhumane life. After all, his government was the one who put him there. He took matters into his own hands and successfully escaped the camp in 2007. He is now traveling the world giving speeches to raise awareness on how he was treated and how thousands of people are still being treated how he was today.
In 1914 Ernest Shackleton set out on a trans-Antarctic trip with a crew of twenty men on a ship called, Endurance. This was a tragically appropriate name as during their voyage their ship became trapped in pack ice, making it totally immobile. With no information on their whereabouts, and no way to contact them, the ship was presumed lost, and no rescue party was sent out to search for them. Eventually the ship began to crack and become devoured by the pressure and splitting of the pack ice. Shackleton realized that his life, and the life of his crew, rested on his shoulders. What proceeded was a story of Homeric proportions lasting nearly two years in the Arctic. Due to Shackletons decisions he not only saved himself, but also saved all twenty of his crewmembers.
Christopher McCandless was an American young adult who had many problems with the government, and his own lifestyle. After graduation from college he took his life into his own hands and decided to travel around the United States of America, to live a life with meaning and without attachment. This of course wouldn't have been possible if he had bummed around waiting for someone else to change his life.
Throughout history we see again and again one individual take a stand and change what they want changed. Again and again in history we see these people realize that it will not be others who change their lives, but themselves. People are individually responsible for solving problems that affect their communities.</p>