Not enough to go around

After watching Morgan Spurlock's 30 days on the life of a minimum wage worker, I find it hard to believe that everyone can still achieve the American Dream.  It has come to my attention that life is so much easier when you're born into a fortunate family.  Well-off parents can raise children in the way that is most acceptable in American society -- Good education, healthy food, lots of extracurriculars, etc. However, a child that is born into a poor family will have much more stress... They will always want to be helping their parents, leading to a much higher dropout rate. Without a good education, their chances of escaping their social class diminishes further.

Tammy Crabtree only reinforces these ideas. Tammy makes no effort to look nice, and the idea of her coming out of her social class is unimaginable. It's obvious that her son wants to move up on the social ladder, but the chances of that are still slim, because he's tied down to his family's current position.  He wants to be a lawyer, but the limitations of his class make this difficult. If he was born into a wealthy family, however, he would be able to go to law school with much more ease.

I believe American society does not reflect the "American Dream". The rich keep getting richer, while the poor stay poor. I recently read an article on Yahoo! News about Mark Zuckerberg's wealth. Facebook's stock is going public for the first time this week, and it's predicted that Zuckerberg's current net wealth of approximately $17.5 billion will eventually rise to above $20 billion.
If his net worth was divided up between 10,000 people, each person would still be worth $1.75 million, which is still a great amount of money.

I don't support Communism/Socialism, but if the wealth from the top 10% of the US population was distributed to the bottom 90% based on amount of need, we would probably be a much happier country as a whole.

Smile, you've just been tagged!

How far can a random, small compliment go?

In our society, we've been taught to stay under certain norms. For example - greet your acquaintances, but stay away from strangers.

A slight deviation away from any of the hundreds of norms we've learned can result in ridicule, isolation, or just some weird looks. Yeah, not something you'd really want to do. You would you have to put yourself in a vulnerable position, which is something that most people would try to avoid. Why stick out of the crowd when you could avoid all the unnecessary attention? 

People should actually be asking themselves, why not? What if you deviated away from a norm in a good way? Sure, you'd get some weird looks, but instead of ridicule or isolation, you would receive praise. 

An event started in my school involving these small notecards... On the front they say, "SMILE, You've just been tagged with a random act of kindness! :)" The mission of these notecards is to spread "Random Acts of Kindness" throughout the school. 

However, these cards have to have a starting point... And that's where I wanted to help. My friend, the president of NHS at my school, picks up a bunch of these cards from the Student Activities office every day. For 5 days in a row, I asked her for more cards everyday so that I could help spread them around.

Normally, students would only give these cards to people they are well-acquainted with. After all, it would make you feel uncomfortable doing a Random Act of  Kindness to some random kid. However, there's an issue with this. If you only pass these Smile cards to you friends, and your friends pass them onto their friends, the cards wouldn't get too far. Most of them would just stay within your circle of friends. 

I decided to go around during lunch and passing periods and distribute the cards to random students. Whenever I handed someone a card, I would give them a compliment... "Your hair looks nice," "You look like a smart person," "You seem like a pretty cool person," etc.

The reactions were great. I got a lot of weird looks.. along with a lot of Thank Yous and laughs also. My favorite reaction was when someone came after me to give it back because they didn't want to carry around the card. As he handed the card back to me, he told me that I was a good person. I could tell he just said that because he didn't know what else to say, but at the moment, I actually did feel like a pretty good person. 

I ended up passing out 40-50 cards, with around half of the recipients being strangers. 

One random compliment can reach out to many, many people.... One smile at a time.

Gender Roles

What makes a boy different from a girl? Too many things to count. It would be harder to find things that are similar between the two! Gender roles in modern day society are extremely strict. Now that I've put some thought into it, there have been a lot of social pressures that have helped form my personality (...or perhaps they've hurt my personality). Every boy wants to be the tough hero that saves the girl in the movies. If I took even one step out of the "box of masculinity," I would probably find myself to be an object of ridicule. For example, a boy from my school decided to try something new his junior year. Instead of taking Fitness or Cardio to fill his P.E. requirement, he took Dance. On the first day of class, he was instantly labeled as homosexual by the rest of the class, who were all females. According to him, they were even changing out in the open in front of him, until one of the girls (who knew the guy) told everyone else that he was completely heterosexual. Social norms caused the girls in the class to quickly assume his sexuality.

Similarly, a discussion came up about whether or not you would let your son wear a dress. I am actually completely against it. As a male that experienced a significant amount of bullying in elementary school, I don't think it would be a good idea. If my child would continue to wear dresses going to school, he would, without a doubt, be teased. Even if he wanted to wear a dress, I would firmly state that dresses are for females only and that he shouldn't be wearing them. I think teaching my son the normal way to dress (according to society) is important. The boy from the TV show we watched in class was defended, but he and his parents also got a lot of attention from the media. Would you want to be put on TV with your child to be judged by the rest of the nation? I sure wouldn't.

Friends

The socializing agent that has changed me the most is probably my peer group. I grew up as a really quiet kid, all through kindergarten and elementary school. I was one of those few "awkward kids" that had maybe one or two friends. We were those stereotypical weirdos that always got picked last in gym class as the team captains narrowed the pool of kids down one by one.

The biggest change in my peer group occurred when I entered middle school. We had two elementary schools feed into this school, so I only recognized half the kids on the first day of school. This was my chance to turn a new leaf, and that's what I [somewhat] did. I found myself with a new circle of friends, and I started to get socialized by them. Awkward Austin became Not-As-Bad Austin as I started to use instant messengers, hang out with friends, and learn how to speak my mind. I also became more interested in sports.

Of course, it wasn't a complete change in mindset/behavior. I still remained silent in class(heh..) and sat like a sponge absorbing information. I also preferred to stay within my circle of friends, not experimenting out of my safety zone. (Girls were scary)

If my group of friends didn't change after elementary school, there definitely would be a different Austin than there is now. For one thing, I wouldn't be a gymnast. Although my older brother played a big role in encouraging me to join my freshman year, my friends were the ones that actually got me to join and try my hardest. This wasn't because they also encouraged me; instead, they told me I wasn't strong enough and that I would never make it through the season. I love a good challenge.

American Culture

After this past week, I'm really seeing that Americans do have a distinct culture that differs greatly from the rest of the world. After reading/hearing the criticism Stefan Schirmer had about American culture and and watching Oprah's journey through Denmark, I'm realizing that Americans aren't all that special. In fact, I'm starting to want to live somewhere else!

I noticed that American consumerism is ridiculous. We buy so much at once, so we can satisfy our long term needs. Why is this? Because as Americans, we strive to be efficient. We want to do everything as fast as possible so that we can spend more time moving ourselves forward in our naturally competitive lives. One way we rank ourselves as being "successful" is by how much money we earn. However, we're always buying into the newest technology and products to stay in line with the rest of American society. What's the point in trying to earn more money if we're just going to spend it all on goods we don't need? A penny saved is a penny earned.

Now that I've put some thought into it, I believe Americans are too ethnocentric. We believe in "equality", where everyone is created equal and has equal opportunity. But with that, we also believe that everyone should act the same way, and not just any way, but the American way. We don't exactly work together too much either. Being in an extremely competitive environment, Americans have a tendency to try to push themselves forward in life. Unless there's some sort of partnership or grouping between individuals, I think Americans are naturally selfish in the thought of bettering their own position.

But I don't want to be too critical about American flaws. The US is a much better place to live than many other parts of the world, and every culture will have its own "flaws" that outsiders won't agree with. I enjoy living in an American society, and I'm very thankful of the opportunities that come with this lifestyle.

We began a new unit last week: Culture.
I've never really been interested in culture, especially the cultures of other people. During spanish class (the previous few years I've taken it), it would consistently be the most boring part of the lessons, in my opinion. However, sociology is really opening up my eyes to a new perspective on this. Instead of just talking about other cultures, we're looking at our own culture through the eyes of others. Stefan Shirmer's article got me thinking about the incredibly odd practices we have as Americans. For example, I've come to realize that a lot of signs we see while driving really aren't necessary.
It's funny... I'm starting to view Americans as jerks. We're all so ethnocentric (please excuse the exaggeration), and we have no idea how to adapt to new conditions/cultures. Since English is the "universal" language, we expect all places to speak it and that makes us take the language for granted.
If mankind was more culturally relative, I'm sure we would all be a lot nicer to those who don't share similar backgrounds to ourselves. Racism is a huge issue in our modern societies, and I'm starting to see the roots of it all.

Last week, we participated in the "Abandon Ship" activity. First of all, I thought it was really fun to defend our own cases while "attacking" others. Some people were really really passionate about the game while others decided to lay back and let natural selection take its course.
However, I wasn't expecting the lesson that was to come out of all of this. We analyzed the reasons as to why we kicked out certain people, learning that sometimes it didn't even depend on the descriptions of the characters, but rather on the personalities of the actors playing the parts. The quieter ones generally had an easier time staying alive because they stayed out of the spotlight. The teacher also did a good job of making us feel evil for kicking out certain people to save our own butts. This was especially true when she read the list of quotes that we said during our discussion. People can be extremely callous, even in a game.