Final Post

In the beginning of the year, i gave a very limited general over view of myself. I wasnt very deep and wasnt sociological at all. Tonight, i sit here typing and im the same person. I havent changed from the first day of school, at least not because of one class or school itself. I think any changes that have occured are because of decisions i made and experiences i had control over. I dont think going to a class or even school everyday is going to change an 18 year old kid. I mean i just coasted after the first 6 weeks, whats gonna happen? It was a fun class though and community service sucked. Peace.

Blue Collar Stereotypes

In the video we watched a while bac, a group of middle class guys dressed up as blue collar workers and went out to "dive bars" as a weekend activity. First of all that sounds like a terrible time, but also i dont think it is right. I think it mocks the hard working Americans and fellow citizens that perform the jobs that need to be down. I also think stereotypes are bad to begin with. They are rude and offensive. Any form of prejudice isnt right and limits oneself from truely living a full life. Accepting others offers many opportunities to your life. i know this first hand with my diverse grou of friends. With different ethnic groups and religions,i know a lot about other cultures and i have positively gained from it.

CRASH

So we watched the movie Crash in class. I have seen it before and it is a great film. It ties in great with the end of our unit on race and racism. It got me thinking about racism and where it comes from. We know it isn't biological. Its social, but why do we as a society need to hate? Especially hate people who are different in skin color. I think hate and racism is all rooted in ignorance and fear. If you look throughout history, whenever a group of people or society every meet another group, there is instant fear of that group, because of differences in lots of things. Ignorance breads fear and that fear turns to hate and prejudice. This prejudice comes the social norm and I think it becomes hard to kick those ideas when they become ingrained in a culture. Take the South, racism is still pretty common down there and even in this day and age its hard to get ride of. How do we end racism? I dont completely know, i think education is important and at an early age. Parents also need to teach their children not to hate and to not judge people based on external features.

Race

So in class, we have been talking about race. Race is different from place to place, from society from society. We also learned the biology behind race, that there isn't any! this may come to a shock to a lot of people because we almost assume there must be something genetic involving race, but there isn't. One of the many problems I see with this is, we should be taught earlier that race is made up, not when we are 17 or 18. We have made up our minds about most things by now. I think a lot of people will have a hard time believing it even if a great teacher like Sal says so, which is unfortunate. i like to think that we come from a more tolerant area but racism is everywhere and even then, without hate, we still acknowledge race all the time. African-American is the "politically correct" term for black, when you can be black and be from Australia or Brazil. We generalize people in our attempt to be less racist, that cannot be the case in our quest for equality among all colors, religions, cultures etc. We aren't as different as we think and need act accordingly.

Monopoly

In class we played Monopoly, but there different rules! These rules were made to better simulate the class structure of America. It did a good job with the wealthy not only starting out with more money, but already having property. The had next to nothing and had really no chance of moving up. Though the game couldn't show the entire process of moving through the class system, it did a good job to show the difficulty. I mean life isn't just buying property and hoping people show up to pay you, but that would be one complicated simulation. I think this sort of simulation can be an eye opener to how different the wealthy are from the poor and all that is in between. It also shows the possibility of the middle class moving up in the middle class rankings. A person can move from middle-middle to upper-middle in a lifetime. This somewhat possible unlike lower to lower-middle or upper-middle to just upper. Wow that was a lot of hyphens. I do think through generations of hard work and smart decisions can allow people and families to move up in the ranks of society. This may be to long for some, but I think the longer something takes to do, the more worth while it actually is.

Wealth in America

We talked about the inequality of wealth in America. A small percentage of Americans have the majority of wealth. Some would say his isn't fair or equal, but life isn't fair. America promises equal opportunity, not complete equality. The Soviet Union promised complete equality, so everyone was poor. do we really want that? Much of the wealth worked their way to their position, sure many were born into but their parents worked hard to get there and benefit their family. Many will say that there isn't really equal opportunity in America, I say that's a lie and an excuse to fail. It's easier to dwell in your own self pity than to work yourself out of your situation. An example from my life is my dad. He grew up in Nevada, Iowa. There was about 1000 people living there and no one went to college. My dad worked 2-3 jobs at a time starting at the age of 13 till the end of high school but he couldn't pay for college by himself. So he joined ROTC Navy and the Navy paid for his college. He got his Bachelor's Degree and served our country, then came back and got his Master's. He worked hard and made sacrifices to improve his situation. It's not impossible to be well off in America, but it does take some actual work.

Saints and Roughnecks

In class we read an article about social deviance. The article provided too classes of people at a high school. The saints and the roughnecks. The saints were rich, white, "good" kids that were allowed to break the rules. when they did break rules and laws it was just considered "boys being boys" or they were just acting out. The roughnecks had it the exact opposite way. They were expected to be bad and eventually were bad. The key point of these was the groups economic back round. The saints had money, the roughnecks didn't. It is as simple as that. Money was the main factor on how society treated them. I would agree that wealth is the overwhelming factor in how our society views people. We expect the poor to break the rules and the rich to uphold them when they want to.

There are definitely kids at my high school who would be considered saints. Without any names, kids with rich parents who play sports, mainly lacrosse and football could be considered saints. I'm not generalizing all athletes, as I once played football myself, because our teams are very diverse. But the richer the kid, the better the kid is at that sport, the more they can get away with. I find that most of the time, the deviance isn't even hidden. It's blatant and no one cares or the people who do, don't matter. The kid's parents can turn a blind eye to such antics.

I would not say everyone is saint, if everyone was a saint at a high school, I do not think it could function. Things would become too much of a problem where no one could ignore it or it would become extremely bad. But the higher income of the school district, the more saints and we live in a very high income school district.