Bacha Bazi

I am horrified after reading the article. I cannot even begin to fathom how our country can be backing the leaders of a militia doing such atrocious crimes. Of course most of the soldiers are disgusted by it, but they feel they have to remain silent in fear of losing their rank. Although by law there is really nothing that can be done about it I feel that the ones who do act out against it, like former Special Forces captain Dan Quinn who beat up an American backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave, he may have gotten kicked out of the Army, but he at least brought light to the situation being evaded.

The sociological mindfulness of the soldiers and police needs to be changed. They see all of this rape and sexual abuse happening around them and stand by and do nothing. In a way they are just as guilty as the abusers. The culture accepts the use of teenagers for sexual needs and even sees it as a form of power. We are backing their militia in attempt to defend them against the crimes of the Taliban, in reality some of the crimes being committed by the militia are worse than the crimes that the Taliban commits.

Letter to Piggys Aunt

Dear Aunt,
    
            I know you're probably wondering where I am, I sort of am too. Our plane crashed on an island but there's no inhabitants but us. The day we went down I was wandering through some creepers trying to figure out where I was and find another living person when I heard a loud sound, I didn't recognize it but in hopes of finding another person I ran toward it, it turns out it was a guy named Ralph. He's a real leader type, calls most of the shots around here. When I came upon him at the beach after following the sound, it turned out that there were others who survived too, a whole handful of us, all different ages. Us older kids have to really look out for the younger ones. Between the four of us there's a lot of disagreeing. Ralph is the oldest so he's our leader, he comes off as a little cocky and insensitive, but that's just the way he is. Another one is Jack, he tries really hard to be brave, but sometimes its too much for him. Like the other day, he had an opportunity to kill a pig so we could all have something to eat, and he chickened out. Then there's Simon, he's more of the deep thinking type. He has this theory that we all have a 'beast' inside of us somewhere.
      
            We are all really tired and hungry out here. Thankfully the weather has treated us alright because we don't have a shelter yet. We haven't gotten much done because we cant agree on anything. Half of us want to build a shelter first, and the other half want to hunt and get food first, food and shelter are necessary for survival, and if we cant agree, we won't survive. That's not the only issue that tears us apart, Ralph has all sorts of rules. One of his rules is when were all together discussing things only the person with the conch can speak, unless of course you're Ralph. Some of us don't follow this rule or agree with the other many, many that people suggest during meetings. Some want no rules at all. We're kind or forming into groups based on our opinion of what would work best for all of us to survive. The shelter builders, the hunters, the rule makers, and the rule breakers.

            One of the good things about this island is its vegetation. The island is thick with creepers and fruit trees. There's these large vines that hang from all of the trees. At night they scare the little kids who call them "beasties", or course our hunters ensure them that they will kill the beasties.

          If we don't get found soon I'm scared of what beasts we will turn into.
                                                                                                             Love,
                                                                                                                      Piggy

Micro and Macro perspective in my life

The survival ship project we did really showed an accurate image of what we actually value about people and each other not only here, but almost everywhere in America. We place a value on each other based on health, social status, looks, youthfulness, and many other superficial characteristics.

We all see it every day in a macro prospective when we come to school. We don’t like to admit it, but we all actually judge each other of a daily basis. While it’s not as bad here in Langford like it is in bigger schools, it’s still happening here. We all have our own groups. We have the kids who play sports, the ones who spend more time with their trucks than their friends, the farm kids, the not so athletic smart kids, the quiet kids, and the strange kids. We mostly stay within our groups and while we’re still nice to them, we still avoid interaction with the other groups whether we admit it or not.

We also see it in micro prospective every day to. Take a look at your closest friends. How many of them share common interests with you? Do you play the same sport? Do you take the same classes? Do you share the same hobbies? I know this is true for me. Almost all of the friends I spend time with are like me. Some of them I have the same job as, some play volleyball with me, some play basketball with me, some are on my cheerleading squad, some like to shop like me, some share my sense of humor, I share something with all of them. Society has taught us to evaluate ourselves and each other and go with what we find the most in common with. Sometimes we conform to the group we want to be in, sometimes we just know where we belong. We are taught to stick to the known.

Sociological Mindfulness

             In the video we watched in class a man was trying to teach empathy. Although we are usually taught to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes” at a very young age, this was on a much larger scale. He used intense examples like the poverty suffered by Americans when the Chinese were profiting off of the American coal. He then reversed the situation to feel empathy for the poverty suffered in the Middle East because Americans are taking the foreign oil.

                It’s pretty amazing how blinded most Americans are to what is actually going on in the world. The media plays us up so much and releases stories of all the good things we are doing in other parts of the world. From our sociological perspective we are heroes. We think that all we do is help other people in other countries and we’re almost doing them charity work. Most of them don’t see it that way. When you put yourself in their shoes, you see we suddenly become the villains. We take their freedom and safety, steal their recourses, crush their beliefs and religious freedom, fill them with fear, and when they stand up against us, we kill them. Much like the Chinese did to us, but instead of learning from it, we inflict it upon others.

                Sociological mindfulness is so important to have a functioning society. You have to be aware of how your actions are imprinting the world around you. Whether it’s something small like deciding to hand a dollar to a homeless person on the side of the road or something much larger like starting your own charity organization, having the ability to understand the struggles of others and make a difference can impact many lives.

                When I think about an example of when I have been sociologically mindful, one specifically sticks out to me. It was three years ago, I was on vacation in Indiana like I do every summer. I was staying in a pretty large town where my aunt lives, that has a large population of homeless people. My aunts church does a breakfast feed for the homeless every Sunday before church. My aunt helps out every week and they were short staffed one Sunday, so my aunt asked me to help out. I am not going to lie, I was scared. I had very little interaction with homeless people because of the area we come from. I didn’t know what to think about them, and did I really want to get up at 6am on my vacation and go feed a bunch of dirty homeless people? I thought about it for a while and I managed to put myself in their shoes, (hypothetically speaking because a lot of them didn’t have shoes). I thought about if I was a homeless person at that breakfast, looking forward to that one descent meal I might get all week, how much I would appreciate every single person helping out with that breakfast, so I went. I was scared at first because I didn’t exactly know what to expect, but soon I was overwhelmed by the manners and the appreciation most of them had. I met so many amazing people with compelling stories. Needless to say, I go back every year.

Why the "Red Scare" was allowed to occur

The Red Scare would not have been as possible without the fear of the American public. Figures that the people trusted were putting fear directly and purposefully into citizens. One of the most important people to our country, Truman, had a huge role in putting the fear into the public. Truman, in an effort to show everyone how seriously he took communism, forced all government officials to undergo loyalty tests. If our own president can’t trust his own countries officials how could we trust our neighbors? We as Americans are so used to living in our safe little bubble that we will turn on each other on the drop of a hat if that safety is threatened.

U.S. entering the Korean War

With the Korea Peninsula now divided between a Soviet-backed government in the north and an American-backed government in the south tensions were quickly rising. It was only a matter of time before the ideologies of both countries were going to be put to the test. The United States was afraid that the Soviet backed North would soon try to invade the entire peninsula, and they were right. Their ideologies involved aggressive military action for control, while ours involved necessary action for protection, so obviously there was bound to be conflict. The United States policy of Containment states that the US will help any country that is being threatened with communism. North Korean troops coordinated attacks on sever places along the parallel and began a movement toward Seoul, this is the reason the United states entered the conflict.

Agriculture industry in the Soviet Union & in the United States

When Stalin came into power he basically wanted to get rid of any traces of capitalism in the Soviet Union, to essentially give the government all the power. Under his New Economic Policy he tried to cause rapid industrialization which had the main impact on individual owned farms. He wanted to transform the nation from mostly individual farms into state-collective farms, which ultimately backfired. Workers weren’t being paid for how hard they worked or their effort necessarily, so they began to stop working as hard because their salaries no longer depended on it. This led to extreme inefficiency.

The U.S. on the other hand is a capitalism economy, meaning we have a lot more private owned farms. We have a free enterprise system which allows small business and farm owners to compete for profit with minimal government regulation. The amount a farm make a year is directly related to the amount of work put in, crops produced, of livestock raised, which is why we are so efficient. The profits are solely made and managed by the farm owners, not the government, which is an example of our free enterprise system.