Final Blog Post Reflection

First of all, I apologize to Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor for writing this final post a bit past the required deadline; I hope it still meets all of the requirements.  The post that I would like to discuss for my final blog reflection is titled Americana, What we See Dictates who we Are.  In brief, what I felt that I did well with this post as compared to some of my other ones is that I was careful with the amount of media I included, used a reliable source to spur the post idea, and made a logical progression from my original thought.  Also, I feel that I had particularly interesting ideas and posed particularly poignant questions in this post.

I mention that I was careful with the amount of media I included because this seemed to be a problem for me with some of my earlier pieces in that I would have too many embedded videos or pictures.  This overwhelms the reader a bit and, although I've found it liberating to use the Internet as a way to further convey my arguments, sometimes the simpler the better with blog posts.  This is a less significant part of my post, but a change nonetheless.

More importantly, this post is a good example of how I've progressed in my abilities to come up with blog post ideas.  I'm definitely thinking about the world in a different way as a result of taking this class because it's not always typical for a weekly assignment to report on and question the world around you.  In this post, my ideas stem from one story I saw on the Sunday Morning Show on CBS.  This program often has interesting stories, and in the past, I wouldn't think to share what I've learned.  Now, I can tell others and pose follow-up questions.  Plus, by using this particular show to come up with my post idea, it makes me feel better about my ability to use certain methods for producing post ideas.  The Sunday Morning Show is now one of my go-to's for blog writing, and I'm happy I found such a good source.

I feel that in this post particularly I made some interesting and significant connections on the topic of "Americanization".  Although I wrote this post in mid-May, it connects nicely to where our course eventually progressed.  Now in class we are discussing the qualms surrounding progression through the lens of Kentucky coal mines.  These mines destroy a beautiful landscape and entrap many people in a dangerous line of work, yet we need coal for our daily comforts.  I bring up similar controversies surrounding the quintessential "American way" to go bigger, faster, and stronger in my post, tying in well to the direction our class was heading.

Using Sports to Come Together and Overcome

I tend to use the New York Times home page as a way to spur ideas for blog posts often if you've read some of my posts.  I enjoy the small videos posted at the bottom of the page that are like a quick column in video form.  One of them posted recently on the home page was a video about an increasingly popular form of wrestling in Senegal called Laamb.  The short film discusses not only what Laamb is, but who is doing it and why.  The wrestling form has gained humongous popularity in Senegal reminiscent of sports in the U.S. such as football and basketball.  Like with these sports in America, in Senegal many young boys try to follow in their wrestler-idol's footsteps so as to escape the poverty-stricken villages in which they are born.  The young boys emulate the wrestlers and sign up for clinics in droves to try and reach stardom.

A Senegalese man who works at a local television station that covers laamb said that of 60 young men at any wrestling school, only 3-5 of them have the chance to earn a living wrestling when they get older, and those who get rich, he said, "you can count them on your fingers."

I find this situation somewhat similar to the mythology surrounding sports like football and basketball in the U.S.  For instance, the redemptive arc or "rags to riches" story is one often thrown around with basketball.  To quote a peer of mine's blog, Casey Baer wrote in his post "Economic Factors vs. Physical Factor for JT", "Poor African-Americans have a larger opportunity to play basketball as they have narrower options for sports, and in many cases use playing on the court as a means to escape gang violence, drugs, or poverty at home."  Baer mentions LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony as a few superstar NBA players who rose above their poor circumstances to get to the pros.

There is some controversy surrounding poverty backgrounds in the NBA, however.  An ESPN article said that even though 45 percent of black male kids in the U.S. grow up in "households earning no more than 150 percent of the poverty line", or $22,050 for a four-person family in 2010, only "34 percent of black athletes in the NBA grew up in that financial situation."  It is important to not stereotype the situation, but nevertheless, 34 percent is still a large amount, and many more could have lived only slightly above that marker.

No matter what the background of the athlete, people come together over wrestling in Senegal and people come together over sports in America, so the natural decision for many underprivileged in both countries is to join the thing that has gained so much popularity and is synonymous with wealth.  Do you feel that education towards a more regular job is the better option for people in poorer situations?  What (if anything) do you think that a society is lacking for its population if the best way for someone avoid poverty or worse is to hope to be one of the minutia in professional sports?  Or do you think that sports are a phenomenal way to bring a country together for a common goal and a viable success option for many who have few?  

Building a Dam and the Issues that Follow

I was perusing the New York Times website and stumbled upon a video op-ed at the bottom of the page about plans to build a large dam in northern Lebanon.  The video said that the dam would be built to better supply water and electricity to a growing population in Lebanon.  The problem, however, is that they only other source open to funding the large-scale project was Iran.



This is an issue for the people of this Lebanese community because, according to the video, the people living around the dam are predominantly and staunchly Christian, and the Iranians are staunchly Muslim.  The Lebanese representative in the video was overwhelmingly against having an Muslims "imposed on" his Christian community to build the dam, but did welcome Iranian financial aid for the project.  "This is a 100% Christian area and we don't want another ethnicity moving in peacefully and then becoming the majority here," the Lebanese man explained furthering his point with, "We are not of the same social texture nor of the same religious [difficult to understand]."


This is an interesting conflict in one of the most politically and religiously tense areas of the world.  This discrepancy seems to layout the basis for the religiously-fueled conflicts in the Middle East.  Usually we hear about unrest between the Muslim groups such as the Hezbollah and predominantly Jewish Israel, but the seems to be strong tension between Christians and Muslims of the area as well.

Not to mention, there is a controversial environmental impact that this dam would have.  The video's narrator said the the dam would "exploit this area's most abundant natural resource."  I found it interesting that use the word "exploit" and not another word choice such as utilize.  Exploit does mean to make full use of, but it also has the negative connotation that when one exploits something, they are selfishly using it as a means to an often controversial end.  The word conjured a documentary I watched a few weeks ago called "180 Degrees South" where, similarly, a dam was discussed, only this time in Argentina.  It's a documentary mostly about enjoying mountain climbing and the outdoors, but more solemnly about the constant need to progress technologically and exploit natural resources for the betterment (or as the movie would argue destruction) of mankind.  It's a very well-filmed documentary and poses some difficult questions to ponder.  For instance, this area of Lebanon is beautiful, the landscape is starkly gorgeous, so it would be a shame to industrialize it with a dam, right?  Not necessarily, however, because people need water and electricity to live comfortably, so what should we do?

I realize that I bring up two distinctly different yet very complex issues regarding this New York Times video, but what do you think about either (or both) of them?  Why are people so intolerant of others from a differing faith?  Should we make use of our surroundings for industry or respect them the way they are?

The Bank's and our American Dream

We all know the story of the American Dream:  work hard, and with a little luck, you have the opportunity to make it big, get rich, and live a happy, healthy, and successful life.  That's all people in America have ever truly wanted: that freedom to pursue what they want to lead a "successful life" (whatever that means to them).  In order to do that, however, you need money.  And money is the basis for the American economy.  That's because money is the basis of capitalism, America's credo.  In order for capitalism to thrive, though, people need to have a constant flow of money, or the ability to spend when they want on what they want.  That's why loans exist, because people don't have a constant flow of money at all times.  The problem arises when people start to either take out loans or give loans when they can't afford to do so as this posted YouTube video outlines.

The cartoon video starts off with a quintessential American-dream setting: a suburban, beautiful neighborhood, and our main character takes out a loan to purchase a house there.  But only soon thereafter, his home is foreclosed upon, and he embarks on a journey with an old grade-school friend to figure out why he is no longer with a home (and apparently no longer with an American dream either).  The journey ensues and ends up being an attack on the Federal Bank and how everyday Americans are being cheated out of their hard-earned money in the "biggest theft in human history".  

Some of the language, despite the video's comical cartoon style, is a bit difficult for the layperson to understand, especially if said layperson were only in high school (me).  But the gist of it is that the Federal Reserve (aka "The Fed") is not a government-owned bank, but rather a private bank that grew to a huge size.  According to the video, "it's about as federal as Federal Express."  It now lends money to smaller banks who lend money to regular people, and in all of this lending the banks end up making money off each other's debt because when you pay back a loan, you pay it back with the added interest.  The crux of all of this, however, is that the Federal Reserve is a privately owned bank that doesn't have a never-ending flow of cash.  So, it gets the U.S. Mint to print money for it so it can lend money to smaller banks and even the U.S. government, who in turn needs to pay back their debt.  They do this through taxes, and the IRS to gives some tax dollars to The Fed.  The video mentions how all of this is unconstitutional due to how a private bank does not have the authority to print money for itself, and that our tax dollars aren't being spent on the best of things, but rather, on our country's debt to a private bank.  

The whole video was a bit of an eye-opener for me, and I naturally had trouble believing all of it thinking perhaps the source wasn't credible.  But it doesn't seem to be lying, and the truth of the matter is that the system described makes sense logically.  But at the same time it does feel as though we are being cheated out of our money for purposes not directly behooving us.  Do you think this is true or do you think it necessary that a centralized bank keeps the other banks in check?  How else do you think money can be regulated in the U.S.?      

Americana, What we See Dictates Who we Are

I was watching a story on CBS's Sunday Morning Show today on the Alex Trebek of the TV show Jeopardy!  Trebek at one point during the interview said regarding Saturday Night Live's hilarious parody on him and his show, "When you make fun of someone like me, and a show such as 'Jeopardy!,' it means we've arrived.  We're part of Americana, we're part of the American cultural scene."

There was something profoundly important, it seemed, to Trebek that his show was such an integral part of American culture.  I also found it especially interesting that Trebek is Canadian, yet finds it to be a final destination for his show to make it in America.  As an American, I do not think I've ever fully understood the vast cultural effect my home country has on the rest of the world.  America's influence is immense, yet it is only 236 and a half years old, relatively young compared to some places, like Rome or Greece whose cultural heritages span thousands upon thousands of years.

This influence is not always a positive one, however.  In the sobering hit documentary Supersize Me, the director interviews a group of first graders on who they think various figures are on different cards.  Although it is never true for each of the kids, the majority of them have trouble recognizing George Washington and Jesus Christ, yet have no issues with recalling how they know the Ronald McDonald character.

McDonald's, originally an American company, has, along with most other fast food restaurants, experienced humongous growth over the past decades.  It used to be one restaurant in southern California, but now, the chain even has stores as far away as India, a place where Mickey D's most-used animal, the cow, is considered sacred.  The Golden Arches can be seen everywhere, and other American-based companies like Starbucks have seen similar success.  In fact, recently the coffee giant changed their logo to not even have the name of their company anymore upon entering an elite business strata.

To quote an article from The Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, this type of "globalization of the world by the United States" has been colloquially dubbed "Americanization" or making everything become "the 'American way'.  Such globalization can be attributed to many things, especially media the article says, due to how the world can now more than ever see what it's like to live like an American.  This entails a sense of businesslike efficiency, it seems, due to how America is known for its immense productivity (cue Henry Ford's assembly line methodology).  The article even says Coca-Cola's influence in other countries has caused for "coca-colonization" or "the importation of American goods and American values into a local culture."  These values can include the Henry Ford-esque productivity, causing for such phenomena as "McDonalization", as the encyclopedia article says, in other countries.  This seems to be quintessentially American; for instance you may have heard of the term McMansion used in your area.  These are gigantic homes built seemingly from midair in a matter of days, thus showing the U.S. to be an a consumer-oriented and efficiency-based society.  Do you think this is a good thing?  Should the world really be more like America?  On the other hand, do you think that the U.S. and the rest of the world is changing to be less like this?  Why or why not?

The Organic Food Gap and Healthiness

Although we had to turn in our junior theme papers a couple of weeks ago, I would still like to write one more post on my theme topic: organic food and its recent popularity spike.  Aside from this spike in popularity, however, is the important, yet depressing fact that many people can barely afford cheap, unhealthy food let alone organic food.  Food deserts are rampant in large cities like my hometown of Chicago.  Food deserts are areas of a usually sprawling metropolis that do not have access to healthy, fresh food, but instead have an abundance of unhealthy fast food.  Fast food is, obviously, extremely cheap, and this fuels an epidemic of obesity among a lower-income population.  Ann Cooper, a leader in the fight against the increasing rate of childhood obesity and a grade school , said in a TED Talk that 25% of the food that she serves her students is either organic or locally grown.  She says that if her students are, "eating chemicals all the time, they're not going to be able to think."  She added, "They're not going to be smart. You know what? They're just going to be sick."

It's hard to argue the fact that obesity, in both children and adults, has increased dramatically.  According to the CDC 35.7% of American adults in 2009/2010 were obese, and 17% of American children are now considered.  This is a strikingly large increase from past years; a generation ago the obesity percentage was closer to 6% of the country's youth population.  One of the links on the CDC's website was to a video that describes some of the major players in the obesity epidemic.  One of the reasons, the video says, that promotes overall unhealthiness are food desert communities.  A study done by Scarborough Research said that people who typically buy organics normally spend 10 percent higher than the national average on groceries and make 22 percent higher income than the national norm.  One man from inner-city Philadelphia said in the CDC video that over the course of his entire life living in the city he had never had a regular supermarket within close distance of his home.  These types of markets are not even all organic, just food that's not processed and pumped with artificially processed foods that are so harmful according to people like Ann Cooper.

One of the predominant problems that many have with organics is that they are overpriced, yet do not provide substantial health benefits.  Ann Cooper is very apt to serve organics in her cafeteria, but there are not many conclusive studies done to suggest organic food in particular is much healthier than regular food.  This, however, is one of the major drivers people who have the means feel regarding the desire to buy organic food.  This discrepancy is trivial, however, when compared to the magnitude of the obesity problem in America.  I've found that more important than uncovering why organic food has become so popular for my paper, it is crucial to wonder why have Americans become so much more unhealthy over the years?  Perhaps organic connotes whole foods like fruits and veggies, and these can help to promote a healthier lifestyle.  Nonetheless, I've found that although there are many admirable reasons to buy organic food, it is extremely important to just eat food that's good for you, no matter what kind.  What do you think?  Should we try and make organic food more accessible or should or priority first be to get healthy food of any type to people as soon as we can?       

Walmart...Organic?

According to a study done by Scarborough Research in 2007, Wal-Mart is the leading seller of organic food in the United States.  The study says, "Twenty-nine percent of organics consumers shopped Wal-Mart Supercenter during the past week."  Wal-Mart, known for its immense store sizes and unbeatable prices, has now not only entered the realm of the often perceived elitist foodie, it has now mastered the market.  How is this possible you might ask?  "The company sells 18 percent of all the groceries bought in the United States--more than anyone else by a wide margin," says an article in the Mother Jones publication.  If a company of that magnitude enters any new market, it seems that that company is headed for success.

Wal-Mart first began its "green initiatives" in 2005, according to an article in the encyclopedia Green Food.  The company has pushed to be more energy efficient; S. Robson Walton is on the board of Conservation International and his grandson, Sam R. Walton, currently serves on the board of Environmental Defense.  One of the largest green advances that Wal-Mart has made is to have all of their fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.  In order to attract more suppliers, the megalith company encouraged non-sustainable fisheries to become sustainable instead of simply skipping them over.        

But there has been a substantial amount of controversy surrounding Wal-Mart's switch to go green.  Take the fisheries for example.  Critics say that perhaps Wal-Mart is doing what is called "greenwashing" or over-promoting green PR to the point that it is not sincere, but merely based in marketing stratagem.  Some think that  the over-fishing many suppliers do to meet high consumer demand is strategically overshadowed by the retailer's commitment to stay sustainable.  Also, according to the Mother Jones article, produce industry analyst Jim Prevor said that a company as big as Wal-Mart can't waste its time "chasing down small organic apple wholesalers and buying 60 cases of apples because that's all they have...I'd be surprised if it's [organic food] more than 2 percent of their total produce."

From the critical point of view, Wal-Mart is not the most environmental or local-minded company around either, and its sheer size doesn't help.  According to an Economic Policy Institute article, Wal-Mart fuels unemployment in the U.S. by using vast amounts of Chinese imports.  The company sells cheap products to many, many people in the U.S. that are easy to make in China, but only through certain, often labor-rights-abusive methods.  This process is profit-minded, which is not in keeping with the organic mindset promoting local businesses and a low carbon footprint.  Yet, Wal-Mart must be doing something right if it has gained so much more notoriety for going green.  The company has built environmentally friendly stores and has packaged items with less material than before.  So what is one to think about all of this controversy?  Is what Wal-Mart doing laudable or immoral?  Should companies like Wal-Mart's still try to be more sustainable or is it just too difficult because of their size?  

Organic Food Juxtaposed with Industrial Food

I've found through some research that one of the leading causes for organic food consumption is to avoid the misgivings associated with the other food option: industrialized factory farms.  There are stigmas attached to these places, some true some untrue, yet nevertheless it is still important to note the major differences between both types of farming and why these disparities exist.  An interesting quote in Mark Winne's Closing the Food Gap gives insight into perhaps why America is currently known for its addiction to all foods processed.  "'We made sacrifices during the Great Depression and World War II,’ I heard many adults say, ‘but when it comes to food, were are now free from physical work and scarcity’” (5).  The adults quoted are average Americans during what Winne describes are the U.S.'s food "Middle" or "Dark" ages: the 50s and 60s.  The rise in families and the shift in technology after WWII could have unarguably led to the quintessential 50s "TV Dinner".  The Americans of yore yearned for comfort, for ease after hard times, and the 1950s were considered "Happy Days" for many (espeicially the Fonz).  


All of this is very interesting to me because despite the seemingly consensual agreement that there was no problem with food in America during the 50s and 60s, the U.S. still managed to change during the late 60s and 70s.  Of course this was the hippie counter-cultural movement catalyzed by the Vietnam War, promoting all things un-American, which at the time included organic food.  And thus, the organic food movement began, albeit in humble, scattered grassroots fashion.  


Vietnam War aside, however, there were, and still are today, major issues with the American industrial food sector that spurred, and continue to spur, part of society to rebel.  There are health, animal rights, and environmental hazards abound in and around confined animal feeding operation (CAFOs).  According to David Kirby's Animal Factory, agricultural feedlot miasma have near 170 different chemicals, many of which cause debilitating human health problems and rearing cattle is a worse greenhouse gas producer than driving cars.  Kirby describes a dairy farm as having "manure-smeared animals...jammed onto strictly confined tracts of land" (7).  He writes how all the grass in the feedlots was gone, replaced by dirt, urine, and excrement of many cows.  A commonly used phrase nowadays seems to be that cows were designed to eat grass, and when they don't have access to it barely at all, it's hard to imagine that's good for their health.  


There are obviously various issues with factory farming, and they are directly juxtaposed by Kirby as he describes a more old-fashioned dairy farm:  "...she had always delighted at watching mothers and their calves gamboling about the green pastures of their valley home.  She figured they were doing whatever it is that cows do at peace in their world" (6-7).  Although this image is somewhat contrived and cliched, it nevertheless seems that our old-fashioned, grittier way of life was turned upside down over the years to many peoples' excitement and comfort.  But as the megalith that is agribusiness proliferated after decades of compounding growth, some caution was tossed to the wind in submission to the incessant demand.  According to the CDC, "More than one-third (35.7%) of U.S. adults are obese.  Approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2-19 are obese."  And if you look at the website linked before the quote paying attention to the obesity progression over the past 25 years, the growth is staggering.  Besides some of the qualms provided above by Kirby regarding today's most profitable food system, it seems that system, or something else, is fueling our country's rampant unhealthiness.  But that is another topic entirely.

Organic Food's Rise and Dip

For the time being, I will be writing blog posts that pertain to my junior theme research paper.  Although we've been working on the paper for some time now, this is my first post where I feel confident in the direction of my thesis, which is exploring the recent growth of organic products in American society.  Contrary to this, however, is an article that I found while researching on the New York Times home page, one of my go-to sites for reliable sources.  The article's title is "Organic Dairies Watch the Good Times Turn Bad", and at first this didn't really surprise me all that much.  We've been living in an economic recession for the past few years, so undeniably people would start to cut back on things deemed as trivial, things like organic food.  This phenomena goes against my paper's exploratory question thus far: "Why has organic food become so popular recently" because of how even though organic products peaked before 2008 after progressive growth, it suddenly dropped in about 2008/2009 (the New York Times provides the helpful graph to the right to show the linear progression in the case of organic milk.)

The article, published on May 28, 2009, says, "As the trend toward organic food consumption slows after years of explosive growth, no sector is in direr shape than the $1.3 billion organic milk industry."  The article also says that farmers have been told by their "conglomerates" that due to the lack of demand and the excess of supply, milk production must subside by 20 percent.  That, sadly, puts many small-scale farmers out of work.  One Vermont farmer in the article named Ken Preston said, "'I probably wouldn't have gone organic if I knew it would end this way.'"

Preston's remark stirred a thought in me about why people "go organic", and thus why it has become so progressively popular.  There is often a difference, I've seen, between why people in supermarkets buy organic and why farmers farm organically.  It's apparent in Preston's case that, although organic foods are nice, it's really all in the name of profit, and profit depends on the choosy stay-at-home parent sifting through piles of various fruit.  No one can see a recession coming, but if Preston had, he probably would've used conventional farming practices, or whatever would make him a living of course.  Despite this downturn in organic food in 2009 especially, there has still been considerable growth from where it used to be, so there must be something strong that still causes regular people to buy organic even in tough times.  In a report titled "Recent Growth Patterns in the U.S. Organic Foods Market" done by Carolyn Dimitri and Catherine Greene of the USDA, "Growth in retail sales has equaled 20 percent of more annually since 1990.  Organic products are now available in nearly 20,000 natural foods stores, and are sold in 73 percent of all conventional grocery stores."  Why the growth is what I'm looking into right now for the next blog post-update, but it seems major retailers selling organic products are definite signposts in the dense forest that is this complex issue.

Introvert vs. Extrovert

Being introverted runs in the family, it seems.  My Mom is self-proclaimed introverted and shy, her mother was, and now, so am I.  For a long time, I was always that shy, quiet kid, and still am in many respects today.  Although I've grown a bit from how timid I used to be, it has always been a deeply-embedded part of my personality and psyche.  To put it honestly, I've for as long as I can remember been a bit embarrassed and somewhat ashamed by my natural timidity, but my insecurities were reassured when I saw the Time Magazine front cover "The Power of (Shyness)".  I wish I could link the article for you, but unfortunately it is only available to online subscribers.  I will attempt to seek out the most important, pertinent, and interesting quotes and ideas for you to get the full picture.

As you can imagine, this cover truly beckoned me.  I was very excited and intrigued to find that someone had written about this topic, and I'm sure some of you would have been too.  One of the first and important parts of the article included the differentiation between shy people and introverts.  Although I've sort of been using the terms as though they're synonymous, technically shy people are anxious about social situations and introverts just prefer to be alone more.  I deduced, however, that these two qualities probably go hand-in-hand.

The author, Bryan Walsh, says, "Simply being an introvert can also feel taxing--especially in America, land of the loud and home of the talkative" (42).  The article often references how we live in a world of extroverts, or very outgoing, gregarious, people.  It mentions some of the world's famous extroverts and introverts.  Take, for example, Joe DiMaggio and Mohandas Gandhi, both introverts, or Steve Jobs and Bill Clinton, both extroverts.  Although, as Walsh writes, there are ambiverts in the middle of the personality spectrum and usually people aren't completely one side or the other, it is often easy to see what bio-genetic tendencies people have.  The following questions are selected from a little mock personality quiz.  See if you or someone you know is an introvert or an extrovert:

1. I prefer not to show my work or discuss it with other until it is finished
2. I do my best work alone.
3. I feel drained after being out and about, even if I've enjoyed myself.
4. I concentrate easily.             
5. People tell me that I'm a good listener.

It might be easy to tell the slant of these questions, but if you answered yes, that means you possess an introverted characteristic.  

It's ok if you did.  In fact, it should probably make you feel a little good because according to author of Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking in the article, "'Extroverts are much more likely to get really excited by the possibility of a reward, but because of that, they won't always pay attention to warning signals...Introverts are much more circumspect'" (44).  Also, the article quotes professor of psychology at Florida State University K. Anders Ericsson about other introversion benefits.  "'You gain the most on your performance when you work alone...And the introverted temperament might make some kids more willing to make that commitment'" (44). 

If you're reading this and feel bad that you or someone else you know is an extrovert, don't feel this way.  Extroverted people have a lot going for them, but are rarely overlooked, unlike introverts.  The pensive introspection that often comes with introverts can't be seen by others, yet many times it should be.  Introverts aren't just spacing out and ignoring society; more times than not they are thinking, and this can behoove a person every once and a while.  I don't mean to sound defensive or facetious, but it really is true.  Outgoing people, although they often probably would consider themselves right in many situations, can learn from quiet people and vice versa.  People are not locked in to one personality, and thank goodness for that.  To quote the last line of the article to end my piece, "I'm happy to be an introvert, but that's not all I am."      

Because It's There

In response to an Outdoor Education class movie we watched today about professional rock climbers, I began to ponder one of the thoughts brought up during the movie: why do people do such dangerous and physically strenuous activities for little to no benefit?  My teacher told us (unsurprisingly to most) that rock climbing as a profession is not filled with fame, money, or luxury.  These guys live out of their cars, so climbers do what they do for personal fulfillment mostly, it seems.  But over time, their fingers get messed up, and ultimately they each have a close encounter with death or terrible injury at some point during their careers.  Is personal fulfillment a good enough reason to do such crazy things?

On the New York Times home page, I found a video about an ice climbing competition in Colorado which was quite similar to the video I saw in class today.  In it, one of the competitors says, "When I rock climb, I feel like I'm moving up to the true potential of a human being.  You know, it's like I'm not bound by the money I have, or the house that I live in, or the car that I drive.  I'm allowed to be free in such a primal way.  I feel like it's just living."

People feel an intense passion to explore their abilities through conquering nature.  In a somewhat like-minded idea, it is commonly believed that British mountaineer George Mallory said the words "Because it's [the mountain] there" to justify his love for climbing, and the phrase has turned into a kind of mantra in the climbing world ever since.  It succinctly, yet somewhat incompletely, epitomizes the need for humans to climb mountains and do whatever else in nature that might be taxing or dangerous.  I always associated the ideas behind climbing, skiing, and other sports as similar to those of industrialization, but after hearing some of the thoughts from the New York Times video, I'm beginning to have some second thoughts.  For instance, some believe that the world was created with obstacles that were meant to be conquered, and the best place to look for these obstacles is in nature.  Just look at recreational hunting; it's mankind showing dominance over the wild.  But it seems as though people don't climb to conquer, as with hunting, but more to be free.

Whether you agree with hunting or not, is it right to adamantly try to declare superiority over our surroundings in other ways?  In America we see it distinctly; skyscrapers have sprouted up in places where there were no established buildings in less than a couple of centuries, and after a mere 28 years since declaring independence, Lewis and Clark set out to explore the West.  That West was then settled and established as a part of the United States culturally homogeneous to practically the rest of the country in less than 150 years.  If I were to go to Wyoming, there would be Wal-Marts, supermarkets, Chuck-E-Cheeses, and shopping malls.  If I were to go to Delaware, there too would be Wal-Marts, supermarkets, Chuck-E-Cheeses, and shopping malls all identical to the ones in Wyoming.  All of these societal locales have replaced what used to be open land, uncivilized wilderness.  This conquering of wilderness has always been one of mankind's greatest intentions, but also one of its greatest controversies.

If you listen to the video, it's hard to not sense the true, unhindered love of life the climber feels when he says the quote written a couple of paragraphs above.  Do you feel that for this reason (or another reason) it is justified for human beings to live above nature instead of with it?  Or do you think that rock climbing and other activities are examples of people becoming one with nature?  Although there are clear, unmistakable differences between rock climbing and "civilizing" nature, do you think that they embody the same kinds of ideas, or are they completely different in terms of their rationales?  Should we cut down a tree to build a building because the land is there?  Should we climb a mountain simply "because it's there"?

Invasive Species

I pressed the tiny play button and was delighted by a whimsically sketch-like animation with a talking rodent (called a Nutria).  I at first expected the New York Times video to be an environmental reprimand telling me to quit being so negligent of my surroundings, but towards the end of the clip, the little rodent says this:

I know that us Nutria have a bad habit of overpopulating areas and over-harvesting the edible plants in a small area resulting in the die-off of desirable plant species, but that sounds a lot like someone else I know of.  I know I'm not really supposed to be here, but neither are you.  [The animation then focuses in on a drawing of a Caucasian man.]

As you can tell, I somewhat just happened to stumble across this little video editorial.  But it raises some profoundly significant issues pertaining to some of our purposes and actions as human beings, specifically many Americans.  It's difficult to tell what the author was trying to get across by saying we're not really supposed to be here, but it definitely argues that many are hypocritical for despising invasive animal and plant species.  Perhaps it is trying to get people to understand a past wrongdoing and hypocrisy within our society's groundwork.

The video focuses a little bit on the prominence of the fur trade in North America during pre-colonial and colonial times.  In looking back on this portion of the animation, I couldn't help but see some criticism of our colonial predecessors.  A massive amount of money, time, and energy was spent on fur trading in North America; the video says that our neighboring 3-million person metropolis of Chicago was started because of rodents' fur.  The author of the video's script might be wanting us to look at the triviality of some of America's beginnings.  We wanted to spread our population, steal the homes of millions of Native Americans and animal species so to more easily trap for luxury fur coats and hats?  And now we're upset at the animals we used to (and sometimes still) trap and kill?  Of course it doesn't make sense, but were our predecessors wrong in their actions?

In an interview with PBS, Donald Fixico, Professor of American Indian History and Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas, said:

...all of the North American continent has been taken away, except for about two percent that American Indians still have that they call their homelands.  The American Indian almost disappeared with the buffalo when less than a thousand buffalo were left by the turn of the 20th century, and only 225,000 Indians had survived the deadly new diseases and more than 1,000 wars. 

Notice how Fixico uses "has" instead of "had" in the first sentence.  The land was and still is stolen from the original owners.  America has been colloquially dubbed "the land of opportunity", but is it really?  Maybe it really is just the land of opportunity for those willing and able to push themselves forward and beat out others.  Were the white colonists and especially settlers wrong in seeking out opportunity on already claimed land?  And as I look at the video's opening shot of the Nutria rat's river-home under a maze of highways, I wonder: are we wrongful and invasive species?  On one final thought promulgated by the end of the video, does all of this matter at this point even though we can't change the past?  As the rodent said, "I'm here now, you're here now, let's just be friends."

Society...Should We Accept or Reject It

Currently in American Studies class, we are reading a book called White Noise written by Don DeLillo.  It paints a vivid satire of the complicated and distinctively funny, yet depressing, world in which we so blithely live.  I couldn't help but connect topics brought up in White Noise to some of our earlier-in-the-year content, particularly the book Into the Wild.  The meticulously detailed, Jon Krakauer-authored biography on the societal renegade, Chris McCandless can be summarized in cliffhanging fashion by a poignant, yet undeniably essential inquisition posed in a review from Publishers Weekly:  "So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska?"


McCandless' death was almost as mysterious as it was tragic in that nobody will probably ever truly know exactly why he did what he did.  Krakauer's book does as close a job to perfect as possible in uncovering the mystery by providing ample detail from primary documents written in McCandless' hand.  Notably, the young man wrote about himself, "No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild" (163).

In DeLillo's White Noise, he chastises through satire society's incessant desire to be inundated with material possessions as he does here when the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is at the shopping mall:

The more money I spent, the less important it seemed.  I was bigger than these sums.  These sums poured off my skin like so much rain...We ate another meal.  A band played live Muzak.  Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promendades, a roar that echoed and wired thorugh the vast gallery, mixing with noise from the tiers, with shufflineg feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction (84).       

You may be able to sense the irony of the first sentence due to how the more money you spend either the bigger the debt and/or the bigger the material smothering.  DeLillo feels, as McCandless did in a way, that society can give us essentials, but it can also more importantly give us non-essentials: frivolous things that drone out (not coincidentally like white noise on a TV set) the true meaning that hides beneath the surface of things.  The passage above describes white noise that we hear every day, white noise that drowns our senses, he feels (live Muzak?  That can't happen.)

DeLillo's satire and McCandless' disapproval can be expressed, ironically, in the popular, alternative-rock/pop song "Sprawl II" by Arcade Fire.  The song goes, "Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl.  Living in the sprawl, dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains, and there's no end in sight.  I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights."

If you watch the music video for the first time, you'll probably be confused and maybe even discomforted, as I was.  But if you look past the inherent weirdness of the video into the message that's being sent, there are interesting parallels to be found.  The girl in the video says at the beginning that others tell her to "quit these pretentious things [singing] and just punch the clock."  She also says "I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights."  In White Noise Jack says, "Brightness settled around me" (83-84) as he entered a shopping mall, a mall that, as Arcade Fire would say is "dead" and "rise[s] like mountains beyond mountains" with "no end in sight."

Perhaps Jack is drowned by the brightness and noise of modern life, a life the girl in the video wants to escape by "cutting the lights" and by singing to avoid "punching the clock".  Also, in the video there are these strange people with no faces.  Maybe they have no more human qualities and are just products of the modern society.  I don't really know, but do you?  What issues exist with our material and technology-based society?  Or do you think that there aren't any issues?  How would Don DeLillo and Chris McCandless react to this music video?


If you're interested in this topic, there's a song by Eddie Vedder called "Society" and it plays on the "Into the Wild" movie soundtrack.  I have it posted below.

Save the Jobs or the Polar Bears

I've recently recalled a conversation I had with my Mom about her brother-in-law, Mike, who is a petroleum engineer.  Uncle Mike has always been in the oil business, and this loyalty to his trade can be seen by how he wouldn't support buying a hybrid car when my Aunt mentioned the possibility.  According to the website Energy Tomorrow, "America's oil and natural gas industry supports 9.2 million men and women across the United States in a wide range of highly skilled, well paying professions."  The site also touted that the "oil and natural gas industry exploration and production wages are more than double the national average."  It also said public data gathered by the American Petroleum Institute found that "the industry distributed $176 billion in wages paid to U.S. employees, plus benefits and payments to oil and natural gas leaseholders."  In a story done by MSNBC (the video is in this post), a large job boom is discussed due to what the video says are "billions of barrels of oil inside a rock formation here: 14,000 square miles in North Dakota, Montana, and parts of Canada."


Despite the large number of jobs and money created as a result of oil and gas corporations, many believe that they indirectly support global warming by literally fueling the automotive industry.  For example, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says, "Automobiles, the second largest source [of global warming], create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually."  The NRDC also says "hybrid gas-electric engines can cut global warming pollution by one-third or more today."  It also chastises the auto-industry by accusing it of creating "loopholes" making SUVs consume more gas than they should.  They claim that closing this loophole would cut 120 million tons of CO2, and that if companies utilized the technology they have to create more fuel efficient cars, CO2 pollution would be cut by more than 650 million tons per year.

This amount of cutting would in turn, of course, cut jobs in the petroleum field.  If America eventually left gas behind, what would happen to all of these jobs?  It is possible that they can be replaced by new jobs created in the cleaner energy field, but this could very well prove to be a difficult transition.

Despite this possibility, the transition does seem to be plausible.  According to an article on HybridCars.com, making electric batteries for cars is a viable future for jobs.  The article says, "Michigan will add thousands of new jobs as it ramps up to manufacture as many as 400,000 battery packs a year by 2012."  If you watch the video in this post, it shows in high speed the process of making a Chevrolet Volt battery.  What do you think about a switch to more electricity over gasoline?  Do you feel that the negatives of plausible U.S. job loss in the petroleum industry are outweighed by job creation in the electrification field?  On a different note, how, if at all, do you feel U.S. dependency on foreign oil fits into this issue?

Warren Buffett and Diego Rivera, how do they Relate...?

In American Studies class we discussed the disparities that arise as a result of racial, social, or economic position in the informal American caste system.  When you have to pour in over $40 million of your own money just to lose miserably in the Presidential election, there very well be an issue with our political and social system.  According to a New York Times blog, in 2007, "Mr. [Mitt] Romney  raised about $23 million in the first three months and ended up spending nearly $110 million for the primary -- $65 million that he raised from donors and another $44 million of his own personal fortune."  The blog also says, "Some analysts believe that President Obama, who raised and spent about $750 million in the 2008 campaign, will come close to $1 billion this time around -- a figure that senior White House officials dispute."

So, on both sides of the system there is copious spending in order to hold power in government.  What if you would be a good President but don't have $44 million stuffed under the mattress for use in the next campaign?  I'm not bashing candidates that spend a lot on their campaigning; if they have the money then they can do whatever they want.  It's simply difficult to not notice that running for office cost an unbelievably large amount of money, and that this could very well discriminate against a large amount of U.S. citizens interested in running for office.  And it's not just running for President.  One website says, "Sometimes people make rought estimates about how much a campaign will cost.  Usually, the suggestion is $1 to $2 per household in your district."  The number of households in any given district depends, but even if it is a reasonably small district, that's still millions of dollars we're discussing here.

If you've kept with me for this long, thank you, but you're probably wondering about how all of this relates to my post's title, "Warren Buffett and Diego Rivera, how do they Relate?"  Warren Buffett is a man of tremendous fortune, most know this.  But did you know that Buffett attended a $35,800 per person fundraiser in Winnetka for President Obama last year? (link to source)  These topics have come up in my American Studies class, yet still relate to topics discussed in my Spanish class.

In Spanish, we learned about Mexican artists during an art history unit.  Of these artists, we studied muralists of the early 20th century in particular, and of them was Diego Rivera.  Rivera was a fervent believer in Communism and he shared these ideals throughout his artwork in many ways.  His murals were often very large, sometimes spanning entire rooms.  In one of these such rooms were two smaller murals, one called "Our Bread" (on the left) and one called "Wall Street Banquet" (on the right).  It is not difficult to see the similarities in how the murals are formatted; in both we see people eating at a table from the same vantage point.  If you pay attention to some of the details in each piece, however, you may notice some Communism vs. Capitalism themes.  One can argue that Rivera is promoting Communism in the piece on the left by showing family values and religious themes, thus suggesting Communism is as righteous as both family and religion to Rivera.  You can also argue Rivera is criticizing Capitalism on the right-hand piece due to the people's semi-closed eyes (closed to the strife of the poor), lavish dining, and hoarding of money/freedom (they are eating with gold ticker tape, a vault, and the Statue of Liberty).  Do you agree with any parts of what Rivera seems to be conveying through his artwork?  Do you think there is a problem with our system in that it favors the rich or do you think the benefits of our system outweigh any negatives?  Why or why not?

TV Tokenism

Notice the superiority that the white guy (Kurt) shows over the black guy (AJ).  Also notice that AJ is the cameraman and thus doesn't get a whole lot of airtime on the show.  He does hold a highly regarding position, but at the same time is not on camera very often so we can see more of the main three white characters' subplots.  One thing to note is that there are two Hispanic characters on the show, and one of them has "ghost-whispering" or ESP-like intuitiveness and the other is a boat mechanic.  In the photo you'll also notice the three white characters in the front of the frame.  They get a disproportionately large amount of screen time to accommodate for familial/relationship subplots.  Also, the white woman towards the back (Lena) also gets a surprising amount of screen time despite not being part of the main 3 characters.  Why do you think this is?

SOURCE

Advertising that Assumes Who You Are

While studying form my math semester exam, I decided to give listening to classical music a try.  I'd heard from someone somewhere that listening to Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. may increase your ability to focus while doing mundane schoolwork.  So, I created a Pandora "Classical Music" radio channel and as the rich symphonies and piano works relaxed my stressed brain, I slowly began to focus on the math better.  What I didn't focus on (and try to never really focus) are all of the ads that pop up on the side of the screen while using Pandora radio, but a strange and somewhat funny thing happened while I worked through the past semester's math.  Unlike most times where I try to block out the obnoxious ads, I realized a big difference in my music listening experience: instead of anti-drug ads, there were anti-wrinkle ads and instead of Pizza Hut plugs, I think I remember seeing weight loss supplement advertisements.

Websites often tailor their advertisements to better target a specific demographic.  Facebook and Google are both big fans of this method of advertising and both gain significant amounts of money from companies looking to put their names out on the world wide web.  T.V. networks do the same.  If you've ever watched The Price is Right or Jeopardy, you would know what I mean.  Nevertheless, I found it strange that the advertisements I saw were based off assumptions made by, I would have to guess, someone at Pandora who controls what ads show up when and where.  They assumed that older people listened to classical music and therefore would like to see the anti-wrinkle and weight loss blurbs.  But I'm not 50+ years old, of course, and as a result found it kind of funny that I would be tried at being sold these types of products.

It turns out that, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Federal Trade Commission, "Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to
tailor advertisements to their interests."  I'm not sure if I particularly care one way or another on this issue, yet I find the results of this survey interesting.  Why do marketers feel that Americans would like to be categorized?  Or from another viewpoint, why do people not appreciate tailored advertising if its purpose is to consider what type of person you are and give you a better online or television-watching experience?

The study done by the FTC was more directly addressing the issues people have with being "followed" on the Internet and subsequently targeted for certain ads based on their web activities.  Even still, in all cases of ad targeting, the same ideals hold true.  The specific privacy and civil liberties issues that arise from this type of marketing a discussed on the blog "Elise on Life" under the blog post titled "Google's New View on Privacy".  Aside from the issue of the right to privacy, however, I'm still interested in the fact that Pandora advertisers assume people listening to Mozart want anti-age cream and people listening to Phoenix automatically need an anti-drug commercial.  


The study says, "Being labeled in ways they [American adults] consider unfair by marketers online and off may be just as important a concern.  Whatever the reasons, our findings suggest that if Americans could vote on behavioral targeting today, they would shut it down."  I find the word "labeled" interesting here because this is kind of what happened to me when I was benignly listening to classical and alternative music.  The subtlety of the marketing is what somewhat discomforts me.  Television advertising that is so subtlety tailored it is practically subliminal is unsettling as well.  I remember last year talking to a fellow classmate about the high number of U.S. Army commercials on during shows like Family Guy, shows that are most popular among the teenage boy demographic.  He was the first to notice that the Army is directly trying to appeal to impressionable, young men while they watch T.V. without even knowing they are being directly targeted from a marketing standpoint.  My questions for you are, when does advertising targeting cross the line into infringement of privacy and does it really matter if we are "labeled" or not by advertisers while we browse the Internet or watch television?    

The Endless Frontier

I recently read an article (or set of mini-articles) about the must-visit places of 2012 on the New York Times webpage because I was curious to see some of the interesting, exotic places listed.  I saw some pretty cool locations like Panama, Chilean Patagonia, and Tibet.  I also saw some places that I wouldn't regularly expect to be there like Oakland and San Diego, California.  What truly came as a complete shocker, however, was to see both space and Antarctica on the list.

It's true, if you have enough money you can hitch a ride out of Earth's atmosphere to view the planet that has housed the only life humans have ever known from the vantage point of an astronaut.  You can also vacation in frigid, barren Antarctica alongside international scientists and researchers (again, if you have the cash).  Despite the amount of moolah spent on each of these excursions ($200,000 to go to space and ranging from about $8,500 to about $74,000 to visit Antarctica in style), it is pretty amazing that these opportunities are available.

People never want to stop exploring and this is a true testament to that.  If wealthy, yet relatively inexperienced people can go to space, what will regular joes be able to do fifty years from now?  Virgin Galactic, the company that is planning to take flights into space, says it, "will establish its headquarters and operate its space flights from Spaceport America, the world's first purpose built commercial spaceport which is now under construction."  I find it somewhat sci-fi-esque and almost comical that this company would put their headquarters at something called a "Spaceport".  It just seems somewhat surreal.  One of the prominent clients of Virgin Galactic is Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group (go figure) a British-based venture capital company.  On Virgin Galactic's website Branson said, "We are here with a group of incredible people who are helping us lead the way in creating one of the most important new industrial sectors of the 21st century."

Branson is a business mogul, a man whose livelihood is based on capital gain and business expansion.  So I see his point in promulgating a "new industrial sector" in the form of space-based tourism.  Yet I cannot help but look at this enterprise or the affluent business in Antarctica run by White Desert with a bit of cynicism.  With all of the strife and struggle in the world today, why would anyone need to luxuriate in Antarctica's frozen desert or Earth's atmospheric fringes?

It seems to be a constant drive by humans to discover, experience, and feel more.  We're never simply content with where we are, we need something more, and I understand this yearning for adventure due to how I have it myself.  That's actually why it surprised me that both of these companies are primarily British-based; America is more often connoted with being a progressive, next-best-thing type of country.  No matter who innovates first, is it right to constantly advance society for the wealthy demographic while not focusing so much on those who need more basic necessities or should we let those who can and want to do something do what they want?  Or should a healthy balance be struck?                

        

Meta Post

At first thought, I did not think that my blog posts had much progression over the course of our first semester.  At second thought, however, I did see a bit of improvement in my use of evidence and subsequent analysis.  My first inclination in starting to write this post was to look over some of my older posts, and when I looked at my first one, I remembered Mr. Bolos' comment listed below the text.  He wrote regarding my first post (which I at the time thought was my best), "The only thing I would ask for is a specific instance from Assange's actions that your readers could more directly respond to."  The issue Mr. Bolos had with the post was that the evidence was too broad-based and, although the initial thought/argument was strong, what I provided wasn't showing enough empathy for the readers.  I gave an excerpt from the interview with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, the whole video of the interview, and pulled quotes out quotes occasionally.  I did not, however, properly represent with succinct, precise evidence the essential part of my argument.  I needed an example from Assange himself, not just what he said in the video.  This is something that I'm currently grappling with while rewriting a portion of my civil liberties during wartime paper, so it is not an issue that naturally works itself out through practice.  Blogging does, however, catalyze the process of me realizing what I need to work on because it has forced me to frequently construct pieces and as a result I begin to understand my writing better.  


I've always had a lot of trouble with revising my own work because for some reason, my eyes can only correct so much of my own writing before I can't tell the difference between good and bad.  The continued practice that blogging gives has helped me realize my faults in previous pieces and then work on them in later pieces.  For example, in my post about gift returning during the holidays, I struggled with continuing my argument because there wasn't much to write about without a piece of solid evidence in which I could base what I was trying to say.  I searched for some scrap of evidence so that I wouldn't be forced to abandon all that I had written, and by the end of writing the post, I found a somewhat solid example that worked well with what I was trying to say.  I probably needed to use that evidence (or something like it) from the beginning so that I wouldn't flounder so much in the first place.  


My first piece of evidence was, "'I bought some games for my nephew.  I decided I had bought too many.  So I needed to return something,' said a shopper in the news story."  It was not a piece of evidence that could support an argument due to how it was merely stating an obvious, uninteresting quote from some random guy.  My piece of evidence later in the post was from another article and it said, "In Japan, it's customary to give gifts periodically to certain people, such as co-workers, bosses, parents, relatives, teachers, and so on.  These gifts are given to express gratitude."  What I liked about this quote at the time was the fact that the gifts were "given to express gratitude", because it was a  point that I could bring back to American societal customs (as many Americans simply give gifts because otherwise it would be rude.)  All in all from this recent post of mine, I learned that it is important to have a text before beginning to write, so as to avoid floundering while getting the thoughts out into words.


In my most recent post, which directly follows the one from the last paragraph, I tried harder to base my argument on something more concrete.  Although I didn't have evidence set aside before I began writing, I had some great primary source information taken directly from my Aunt Marie, and I knew that I could find some solid evidence about the topic I was discussing once I got to the point in the post.  Nevertheless, the process I underwent in writing the most recent post was a somewhat long one, and it well exemplifies one of my bigger difficulties in writing blog posts: they take me a long time to finish.  In learning from these past posts, perhaps it would be better for me to base my posts in hard evidence I find first instead of finding proof of my argument as I write.  For whatever reason, this has been my natural inclination, and from this point on, I'm going to try and reorder my blog post writing process so I don't take up too much time writing them and can thus finish them on a more regular weekly basis.  


Part of why I originally chose this process to write posts was because I wanted to start writing about something I liked, not just basing an argument off of some piece of boring evidence I find that would work for a post.  Part of this meta post is to analyze not only your writing habits, but your post idea habits as well.  As I looked through my blog posts, I noticed that most, if not all of them, were based off of experiences I had that day or something that I saw on the news.  When I looked further into the posts, however, I noticed that there were a couple of themes that permeated throughout a few seemingly unrelated pieces.  I wrote pieces about people wanting the next best thing, the changing tides of the baseball industry, a changing new, technologically-based generation, and American football becoming more popular in the U.K.  News is based on the idea of progression or change in some way.  If there was nothing changing in the world, we would have no stories to report.  This, of course, is not and will never be the case.  Since I enjoy the idea of hashing out what is in the weekly news through a blog medium, I often write about what the T.V. networks and newspapers are discussing.  That is why some of my posts somewhat reflect the theme of progression, because they are based on the news at the time.  The theme of change or progression was quite prevalent in my earlier writings (all of the aforementioned posts were written in a two month time span.)  Why this is, I don't know exactly, but I do like having a common thread connect a lot of posts and may try to creatively do this in the future.                

A Yankee in the Deep South

I'm fortunate enough to have relatives that are open to discussing many of their past experiences, which really lend themselves to being clear portals into history.  In American Studies class, we've been learning about slavery and what led up to racial segregation in southern states and this coincidentally aligned with a bit of childhood memory that my aunt relayed to me over winter break.  For a little background, my mom's family moved around quite a bit while she was growing up due to her father's line of work, and when her family moved from New York City to Vicksburg, Mississippi, you can imagine that it was quite a culture shock.  It was, by my deductions, akin to that in the film "My Cousin Vinny" where New Yorker Joe Pesci confusedly and hilariously asks, "What's a grit?" in an Alabama diner.

Although my mom in particular wasn't very old when she moved from New York to Mississippi, she did have four older siblings that remember living in the South very well.  One of those siblings is her sister, my aunt Marie, who divulged some old memories she had of Vicksburg to supplement the snapshots I've already gained from my mom.  My Aunt Marie said the southerners made fun of her distinctive New York accent, called her a Yankee, and even proclaimed that the Confederacy won the Civil War as they flew the Rebel Flag, all probably just to spite her.  My mom remembers young, Cajun men coming home at dinner time with knapsacks on their backs, squirrel tails and turtle shells popping out the tops.  People didn't wear shoes; smaller roads were never paved, thick forests encompassed the land directly behind houses.  It's somewhat hard to imagine that this is America in the late 1960s/early 1970s very close in time to when U.S. astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969.  Space travel and turtle soup for dinner, both in America at the same time.  Despite significant differences in society, my mom's family also experienced more significant differences in racial segregation while in Mississippi.

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement was in full force at this time and my relatives have told me that they attended one of the first integrated southern high schools in Mississippi, and the discomfort on the half the southern whites was noticeable.  Aunt Marie recalled with disgust and horror how it was commonplace on the bus for a white to get up and move seats if a black person sat down next to them.

A high school integration that has been most notable in the history books has involved the famously dubbed, "Little Rock Nine" which referred to nine black students who in 1957 chose to attend an all-white, Arkansas high school.  Fights and mobs broke out at the school and then President Eisenhower had to order in troops to protect the black students.  A short video and longer article by the History Channel said, "One of the nine, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, was surrounded by the mob, which threatened to lynch her."  The article also said that Little Rock's mayor actually ordered in troops to keep the black students out of the school to prevent any violence from erupting inside and that this opposition to integration was the staunchest since the Reconstruction Era.   

Mississippi officially integrated their high schools in 1970 (right as my mom's family moved there), but separation still persists.  In Charleston, Mississippi, NPR did a report on the first integrated prom at the local high school.  It was 2008.  While listening to the story, a Charleston High School then-recent graduate said that it's really the parents causing the separated proms.  She recounted a time that a black student wanted to enter the white prom to see some friends and was escorted out of the building.  The white prom, she said, involved the parents more, in that the fathers would dance with their daughters and the mothers with their sons.  What kind of differences do you see between racial tensions today and racial tensions of decades past?  What has changed and why?  Also, how have these racial tensions been charged by societal differences between the South and the North and how has the strength of this charge changed over the years?