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Re: FIRST LGBT+ (A blog by and about LGBT+ people in FIRST)
If you're not careful, (and even if you are), FIRST can be a very lonely experience. It kills your social life outside of robotics, because after the 3rd or 4th "I can't, I have robotics" people stop asking. At least in my experience. YMMV.
Build season is spending 30-40 hours a week with the same 20 people. After a while you start to get sick of one another. You get caught up in robot building and forget to be friends.
But there's a pay-off. You finish the 6 weeks, you look at each other, and say "We did this, and we did this together". You get a break, and your friendship is stronger because you bent, but you didn't break.
For me, the real reward of robotics is the competitions. Its not only a testament to your skill, but to your teamwork. It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a team to build a robot. That feeling of being a part of something greater, I don't know about you, but that's what I live for.
Now imagine if you didn't have any of that. Imagine if you gave your life to the team (and I know all of you have), and you finally decided that you could trust your comrades enough to tell them who you really were, and you were ostracized for it. You were quarantined because someone decided that you weren't the effort. No one wanted to make the effort to understand you, and you were punished for being yourself.
Isn't that what were are all in robotics for? Have we lost our identity? Remember how good it felt to finally find a sport that you identified with, that you were finally really good at. Imagine if Dean Kamen had decided to not start FIRST because he didn't want to "divide the athletic community". The whole point of our league is to be inclusive and disruptive.
Everyone who questions the "point" of this blog is questioning the "point" of FIRST. The blog is inclusive and disruptive. This blog is a microcosm for the culture shift we want to bring around in the world at large. Everyone arguing against this idea is arguing for the status quo, and I could imagine a thing further from the mission of FIRST.
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