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account for? Use your own ideas and experiences, as well as additional research to support
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your position.
3. Connection. How might it affect your thinking if you would likely live your “next life as a person
[...] earning less than $2.50 a day”? What changes might you make in your world today?
4. Speaking and Listening. Locate a speech online of someone who is discussing the issue of
global climate change. Listen to the speech carefully and write an explanation of why you think
the speech was an effective one or not. Focus on both the content and the delivery of the speech.
5. Research. What world religions include belief in reincarnation or karma? Choose one to learn
about and compare its approach to reincarnation or karma to Alexander’s ideas on the
Changing the World
subject.
6. Exposition. Alexander identifies climate change and economic and racial inequalities as main
issues that can be discussed effectively in terms of reincarnation. What are other issues that
she does not identify that could also be explored with this line of thinking? Explain how this
thought experiment could help provide perspective on these issues.

from Speech at UCLA

Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta (b. 1930) is a labor organizer and civil rights activist
who, along with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, formed the United Farm
Workers union, the first in the world to successfully gain bargaining
and other rights for agricultural workers. One of her many Cathy Murphy/Getty Images
accomplishments was the highly successful Delano Grape Strike,
which was a widespread boycott of the fruit to push for better
working conditions for those who picked it. Huerta is also credited
with popularizing the phrase used by many protesters “Si, se puede,” which roughly
translates as “Yes, it can be done.” She has won numerous awards for her activism,
including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, during the ceremony for which President
Obama quoted her as saying, ‘Don’t wait to be invited. Step in there.” This was a speech
that she delivered to students at UCLA on February 22, 1978.
KEY CONTEXT Huerta references a hunger strike that Cesar Chavez, her friend and co-founder of
the United Farm Workers union, went on for 24 days in 1968 to support the grape boycott.
Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy visited him to show his support.

saw the Martin Luther King movie the other day, the same time that these civil rights, the big
Ihow many of you saw that? The film that they organization was going on in the South, and we
have on the Martin Luther King struggle, did any of were almost organizing simultaneously when King
you see that? They had it on NBC the other day. In was organizing. And I thought to myself, of all of
seeing that they were showing all of the things that the things that have changed for the farm workers
had changed in the South like integration, people in the last twelve years[….]
having the right to vote, and the tremendous Farm workers had no unemployment
changes that were made in a twelve-year period. insurance. It wasn’t until Governor Jerry Brown
And I remember we were organizing the union at got in and there was an Assemblyman here from
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