Who am I? Part 1

I only partially believe that heredity, parental characteristics, cultural environment, and birth order shape who you are. I believe in genetics and partially environment, but I also believe some things are just Gods work.

            I am the middle child in my family and I share only some of the ‘typical characteristics’ of the middle child. A common trait of the middle child is creativity; I definitely am pretty creative and good with crafts and artistic things. Middle children are also supposedly shy and loners, while I enjoy my alone time like everyone else once in a while,  I enjoy spending most of my time with friends so I don’t really consider myself a loner and definitely am not shy. Other characteristics of middle children are competitiveness, because you’re constantly competing for attention, rebellion also because you’re seeking attention, and being a peacemaker. I am pretty competitive, but I’m pretty well-behaved, and I usually start more arguments than I resolve.

I only partially agree with heredity because I don’t really look like either of my parents. I am much taller than both of them, my mother was always pretty stocky in high school and my dad is pretty stubby so my body type most likely comes from my grandfather on my mom’s side who is tall and thin. I share some physical features as my parents such as my dad’s blonde hair, my mom’s brown eyes, my dad’s nose, hands, and feet. It is a big joke in our family when we see pictures of my grandmother when she was young to call me ‘little Adeline’ because I am a spitting image of her.

 My parents parenting habits also don’t really have an effect on me either. My dad doesn’t speak to me very often and while he loves me, he just doesn’t really know how to be a parent, he mostly parented me through weekly phone calls and presents on Christmas and my birthday, and I accepted that when I was very young and I have no intention of parenting like that. My mom is not very strict and lets us by with basically everything which lead to behavior problems in my older brother and younger sister, I learned to parent myself so I’m not really affected by her parenting habits either.

            I believe that my cultural environment has had a large impact on me. My family is religious so I’ve always had pretty good morals in that aspect. Also, I live in such a small community there’s always someone looking out for me and making sure I’m ok and behaving so it encourages me to act better.

            In some aspects I do believe that heredity, parental characteristics, cultural environment, and birth order have an effect on what you look like and the person you become. Although, ultimately I believe that choose the person you become and how things effect you, but obviously you cannot control the physical traits you inherit.

Veterans Day Blog

I strongly feel that the ROE is much too harsh on our troops. While they are in a situation where their lives, the lives of their comrades’, or the safety of our country, are being threatened, they should not have to be afraid to defend that. Their duty is to serve and protect, they should only have to worry about following the guidelines of those simple duties. I do agree that there should be should be some regulations to follow, but they should serve the best interest of our soldiers. At no point in time should we ever go to the extent of having enemies testify against one of our own men. How are they supposed to take pride in serving our country when we treat them like criminals?

The way I interpret the quote “Citizenship is a duty, not a privilege” is that we all abuse our rights as a citizen. We walk around carrying on with our everyday lives free to do whatever we want and feel safe and secure. We all too often forget that that freedom isn’t free. We think that these privileges are given to us just because we are citizens of the United States, we don’t think about all of our troops currently fighting to keep those privileges for us and then being treated like criminals for it. We see our veteran’s suffering from being poorly taken care of, some suffering from mental illness, some from physical disabilities, and we do nothing. Some of us look at them like their crazy; some of us feel sympathy but still do nothing out of fear for ourselves. It is our duty as citizens to make sure our soldiers are not only treated well while serving but also when they’ve come home. They fight for us, why can’t we fight for them?

Racism

                The first article ‘Is racism a Western Idea?’ refers to racism as: “the hierarchical ranking of human beings based on biological characteristics.” Racism usually is necessarily rooted from biology because color is hereditary in nature. Many scholars believe that the practice of slavery stemmed the grounds for racism. Slavery has been around for thousands of years. Many ancient groups such as the; Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians all practiced slavery. The Greeks and Romans employed slaves as domestic servants. In some ancient civilizations, slaves were also used as objects of trade and as a form of currency. The most interesting part is that often time’s slavery had nothing to do with race. In fact, slaves were sometimes the same race as their masters. Slaves back then were graded on social status not race or color. Europeans began to think that some races were superior to others just by nature because they believed in the bible that all men were created at the same time. If that is true then they couldn’t explain why some cultures were more advanced than other cultures. They started to attribute that to race and color.  European people noticed that the people they considered barbarian were dark-skinned. They began to think that there must be some relationship between physical attributes of race and civilizational achievement.

I like how the second article sheds some light on the face that racism is not just for white people anymore. When we discriminate against another minority it’s extremely looked down upon, but it is somehow more acceptable for them to do it to us. The situation with the “Sprite Step Off” step-dancing competition just goes to show how some forms of racism are more equal than others. If an all-black group would have won there would have been no conflict. Also, I like how it talked about the fact that the United States gets stereotyped for our large amounts of racism, when there are countries far worse. We wouldn’t be considered a ‘melting pot’ if we weren’t acceptable of many different kinds of immigrants. We are more open to cultural diversity that any other country. The experiment that psychology teacher Rebecca Bigler did with preschool students by making them wear different colored shirts, really showed that superficial ideas of superiority are engraved in our brains from such an early age. Whether or not the children wearing opposite colored shirts were friends before the experiment they stopped being friends with each other over the t-shirts because they thought that somehow the color t-shirt they wore meant something, as if it made them better than their classmates wearing the other colored shirt.

Article three ‘Cultural Bias for Racism’ talks about how America’s culture could be the biggest contributor to racism. We are all a little bit racist whether we know it or not. The stereotypes we hear and things we see are engraved into our minds. Every group of people has a stereotype. Blacks are associated with laziness, women with weakness, white males with power and wealth, old with lonely, children with reckless. The study they did with their subject’s response times of paring stereotypical words together. I feel that the responses they received would be similar to anyone in Americas. We’re all subject to the stereotypes that we hear every day. I don’t think that that text necessarily proves that were all crazy prejudice or anything, it just means that we’ve often seen and heard these words associated with each other a lot in our society. Of course, with all of these stereotypes engraved in our minds, we need to realize that it’s normal, we all have them. We shouldn’t feel guilty for having the same thoughts as everyone else. What really matters is our behavior about them.

1.    Is Racism culturally universal or a Western civilization concept? Is it a byproduct of media and western culture?

I believe that racism is absolutely universal. The struggle of racism occurs in almost every part of the world. I believe that it’s not necessarily a direct byproduct of Western Culture but could be greatly influenced by the elements in the culture of where we are. Like it said in article 3, “Literature, movies, TV, radio and the Internet all contribute to the problem by exhibiting the same stereotypes that others work so hard to snuff out.”

2.      Where did racism come from and when did it start?

Racism has been around since the beginning of time. Racism was around before even slavery, slavery was just a reinforcement of racism. The phycologist in the first article stated: “We do have accounts by Chinese historians in the third century B.C. describing encounters with savage people “who greatly resemble the monkeys from whom they are descended.” Muslim travelers during the Middle Ages frequently made derogatory comments about blacks.” It goes to show that there were signs of color consciousness in the ancient world. The first real account of European racism happened as the Europeans were exploring different parts of the world. They noticed all the different colors of skin on people. They came up with conclusions such as their skin color being an adaptation to their climate. They also noticed that in most cases, the cultures of the darker skinned people were less advanced than white culture. They began to conclude that there was a direct relationship to race and civilizational achievement. The darker skinned you were, the dumber you were basically.

3.      Is racism everywhere?

Yes, many believe that the United states has the largest role in racism in the world, which is not true. As stated in the 2^nd article, “In East Asian countries such as Japan and China, other Asians rank below natives, Europeans pass muster as civilized creatures, Middle Easterners are a cut below, and Africans are barely tolerated—most think of them as second-rate humans at best. In Latin America, where most people are “mestizos” of mixed racial heritage, there still exists a kind of caste system headed by creoles of mostly European descent.” I feel that racism does exist everywhere in the world where there is mixed races. We all have eyes that can see the different colors of skin, for almost all of us; it’s the first thing we notice about a person. For some reason we feel that that is good enough reason to treat each other differently.

Welfare

	Myths:	Realities:
1	Welfare discourages employment.	Welfare can get people back on their feet and motivate them do get a job and do better for themselves.
2	Welfare in a child’s life teaches them to be lazy.	More cash welfare early in a child’s life improves the child’s income in adulthood.
3	Handouts will make people lazy.	Welfare can help people get the extra boost they need to get their lives together.
4	Welfare has no effect on a child’s nutrition status	Welfare can improve a child’s nutritional status.
5	Welfare will make kids lazy and not get an education to support them.	Welfare can improve a child’s educational attainment.
6	People on welfare cause everyone to pay more taxes to pay for their free health care.	Welfare can improve a person’s life length due to availability of medical attention and vaccines.
7	Democrats are known to support welfare.	Bill Clinton does not support welfare.
8	People on welfare use the money irresponsibly to buy alcohol and junk food.	Most people on welfare use the money responsibly to survive to feed themselves and their families.

 

 

 I agree strongly with welfare to some extent. Welfare is a necessary part of our economy. Without it people would be unable to afford the proper food and medical care they need to survive. Most people have the same views as Clinton. Clinton thinks that welfare is an excuse for people to be lazy. He along with many other people assume that people on welfare are unmotivated and are just getting away with milking tax dollars so they don’t have to get a job. Of course this may be true for some people on welfare, but those who desperately need it cannot be stereotyped with the ones who abuse it. Clinton thinks that people should be given 5 years of government assistance to get back on their feet and then it should be taken away. While I agree with this to some extent, it wouldn’t be fair for every case. In the situation of a single mother trying to take care of her 4 children by herself, she could work all day just trying to make ends meet, and it still might not be enough to keep food in the fridge. I think that It’s important that we look at more than one side when talking about taking away things that are keeping so many people alive.

“Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.”-Andre Gide

Often we conceive death as someone physically no pulse, not breathing, dead. That is not necessarily true. There are several ways to ‘kill’ people. Sometimes it’s with the things we say; words can hurt a person just as much as physical abuse. Saying things that personally make someone feel attacked or unworthy can leave deep internal wounds. “If you kill a man’s sprit, you just as well kill the man.” We sometimes don’t realize how big of an impact the things we say can have on someone. While the pain we’re causing isn’t physical, it can sit deep inside of them long after the words are said. People carry the words with them everywhere they go, letting it haunt them, every time they look in the mirror, it’s not their reflection they see anymore, but the words and the names. Eventually the mental torture wears down on people and they begin to start believing the things themselves. They become a more quiet, shy, nervous, depressed, shell of a human that they used to be. The words slowly driving them crazy, leading them to do things they never thought they would. They’ll find a way to ease the pain, often times inflicting pain upon themselves, making their outside hurt just to take a little away from the pain their feeling inside.  We make people feel like outcasts. We tell them they are not welcome or good enough to be a part of what we have. They no longer get to feel like they are a part of society or that their existence is not valid. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget the way you made them feel.”

Same Sex Marriage Amendment

               If I could propose the next Amendment to the constitution, I would propose an amendment allowing same sex marriage. Same sex marriage has been becoming a bigger controversial issue in the United States. Gay couples and their supporters have been fighting for their right to marry for many years now. A major victory for them was the recent passing of the law by congress allowing gay marriage nationwide. Still, there are many loopholes, some states still do not allow it, making it complicated for couples to get married, because they have to appeal to a higher power, and even then, sometimes when they are married the states they live in don’t recognize their marriage as legitimate. Personally, I believe our treatment of same sex couples in the United States is unjust. While their amount of supporters is growing all the time, some people still disagree with it. We all need to accept that our culture in changing all the time and eventually they will have all the rights as traditional opposite sex couples anyway, we may as well embrace this change now.

17th and 23rd Amendments

17^th Amendment

·         The 17^th Amendment states that each state shall have 2 senators chosen by the people. Each senator will get one vote for six years. It allowed the senators to be freely elected.

·         The purpose of this amendment was to make the process of getting a senator fair instead of being able to be bought out by the person with the most money.

·         It was created during the Progressive Era when reformers were trying to improve America’s health, education, and moral standards, and fight corruption in state and local governments. Today it provides a process for filling the vacancy when a senator dies or leaves office.

·         The most recent example was when Barack Obama was the Illinois Senator and got elected President of the United States, so then his seat was vacated. The governor Illinois at the time, Rod Blagojevich, now needed to fill his seat. Soon an FBI investigation found that Blagojevich attempted to sell the seat to the person who offered him the biggest contribution to his reelection into office. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office.

23^rd Amendment

·         The 23^rd amendment was passed on March 29^th, 1961. It gives the residents of the people of the District of Columbia the right to vote for the countries President and Vice president. The number of qualified electors for the District of Columbia is the same as the state with the least population.

·         The purpose of the Amendment was because the residents of District of Columbia felt they were being treated unfairly not being allowed to vote.

·         Because the District of Columbia is not technically considered a state, the residents are not permitted to vote. The citizens of D.C. eventually campaigned for their voting rights, resulting in the 23^rd amendment.

·         Today, although the residents can vote for the President and Vice president there is still an existing issue in terms of the other voting rights of all the District of Columbia residents. This concern has also remained as a political issue among all citizens of the District. The most recent controversy was in 1978, the U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Amendment for the District of Columbia. It intended to give all the residents their full voting rights, however, the amendment failed to be passed by several states in the country.