I think most everyone would agree how inspiring it is to read these words from a convicted “lifer” in the state prison. By the way he writes, you can tell that he’s thought about this a lot, and it’s something that has opened his eyes to a egregious misconception about convicted life felons in prisons. While these people may have committed heinous acts of crime, at the end of the day they are still humans, and unless they’re insane, they are usually perfectly capable of exhibiting all the typical human emotions. They can feel regret, sorrow, disappointment and as this lifer points out, compassion.
The average person wouldn’t be surprised to hear that lifers in prison can feel sorrow, as well as disappointment for letting down the people around in them in their lives. We can all agree, hopefully, that is a logical feeling for such a person. This then brings me to regret. This always seems to be the one emotion that everybody refers to when talking about how convicted criminals can apparently “change” after spending time in prison. It’s constantly a staple when discussing human interest stories about inmates. They’re remorseful and they feel regretful and if they could go back, they would do things differently. You often hear about stories about an inmate murderer that has grown a relationship with the family that he took a loved one from. For instance, I once saw an episode of Locked Up (I believe), where a segment of the show was about man who is in prison for life for murdering his girlfriend. The man developed a close relationship with the mother of the deceased girl, and the woman often visited him in prison, almost like she was his own mother. The woman was able to forgive him and help him become a better person behind bars, which the segment of the show mainly focused on. But there was also a focus on the man, for being able to express such a regret that would allow the woman to feel that way in the first place.
So what I’m trying to say is that regret is often the selling point when talking about changed men in prison. And feelings of sorrow and disappointment are sort of expected of them. But compassion, on the other hand, is never thrown into the mix, as it is rarely expected and rarely talked about when feelings of it DO occur. The average person, like this lifer wrote, expects inmates to be vile human beings that in no way are capable of showing compassion, especially to fellow inmates. But this lifer chooses to prove that wrong in his writing. It’s interesting that people don’t often think about this, and consider that compassion often still remains in men that are serving life sentences.

I think that health care should be an equal right to everyone that is a citizen of the specific country that they live in. So yes, immigrants should have the same right to health care as the country’s citizens, as long as they first make the effort to become citizens. It’s a two-step process. And with so many people immigrating into the United States, I think it’s important to keep this in mind. In order to benefit from the same advantages and freedoms that everyone in our country enjoys, you must first become a citizen. Does it require a little bit of work? Yes, but it’s a necessary filter for the already scarce institution of health care.

Apparently Comedy Central has taken the episode down from its website, so I couldn’t watch the episode, but I read about it and it’s pretty offensive. The show depicts the Prophet Muhammed in a bear suit. But at this point, is anybody really surprised? Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been doing this for years, and we’ve all come to expect them to offend people with each episode. Does that make it right? No, of course not. It makes us desensitized to it. Which is probably why we’re a little surprised to see someone fight back. I think this Islamic website may have brought things back into perspective for us a little bit.

It’s humbling to see this shift in approach of our country’s attitude towards other countries. People in other countries probably think America is ignorant in learning about other cultures. But it appears that finally the nation as a whole has understood the importance of learning other languages and developing that education for our youth. Learning Spanish is important in a domestic sense, in that the language is rapidly developing in America, but learning Chinese is crucial in an international relations sense. Becoming well-versed in Chinese will create a tremendous amount of opportunities for our country’s youth as they grown into world leaders, sharing a future with their adversaries in other countries.

It’s shocking to learn the realization of what exactly drives a suicide bomber in the Middle East. The female suicide bomber in this video and the suicide bomber of the Moscow subway system a couple weeks ago were both widows to people unlawfully killed by Russian militant forces. These civilians were just avenging the death of their loved ones, a noble act by some accounts. But in America, they are never perceived as such, and those pieces of information are always left out of the report of the suicide bombing. The most chilling example of this was in the article and the unrefined, brash words of the man who had five family members killed. The man, whose “heart is burning,” said he wanted to become a suicide bomber even if it “breaks me into pieces.” That’s raw, and if that doesn’t perfectly depict the mentality of a suicide bomber, then I don’t know what does.

To answer her question, I would say that as a whole, men don’t feel the need to conform to society anywhere near the degree that women do. Women are much more vain and self-conscious and are easily influenced by the depictions of beauty portrayed in film, television, magazines and all other forms of media. Women feel pressured to conform to these ideals and norms because those examples are essentially what beauty has been defined as to both genders. Women also adopt a greater sense of “competition” amongst each other in terms of searching for mates – often men with paternal traits. Men, meanwhile, place less emphasis on this search and are by nature a more isolated and individual group. Women feel they need to do whatever they can to acquire these men, and the competition amongst each other is so strong that women often have to correspond with the characteristics and traits of this wide-held beauty.
Additionally, men tend to age worse than women, so I think men are more likely to relax with their look, knowing that someday soon (usually starting in their mid- to late-20s) their age will take over. Men with receding hair lines are very accepted in our society, and don’t often face public backlash or humiliation for it. So many men “suffer” from it, but it’s an accepted rite of passage, so to speak. Meanwhile, women that suffer from something like sagging breasts are looked at differently. Sure, it’s similar in that it comes with age, but it’s also considered much more unattractive. This may not make sense, but let me get back to the point...
I am a very vain 20-year-old, and I don’t try to hide it. I care about how I look, I care about my style and the clothes I wear, and I care about how my body looks. I go to the gym often, in part for the health benefits that come with physical fitness, but more so just to make my body a little more sculpted and more appealing to women. I’m not ashamed in saying that. I know there are many more male gym-goers that are the same way, and certainly plenty of women too. When I see “ideal” looking men, I’m sure I subliminally take mental notes of a way to look. I don’t do it consciously, but obviously I got the idea that ripped muscles look good from somebody with them, right?
I think the reason men don’t conform as much to these traits portrayed in the media is because, like I said earlier, men are a more isolated and individual group, and are more likely to “pave their own roads,” so to speak. Men like to blazon their own trails and lead the way for others, and often that means experimenting in different looks or quite simply just looking, doing, and wearing what feels good – regardless of whether the opposite sex will be attracted to them or not.

I’ve never changed my opinion on anything Sam has said this semester. In fact, I’ve disagreed with him plenty of times on the angles he puts on different race and cultural issues that we talk about in class. I think he makes things simpler than they really are. There are many different levels to a lot of these problems and I think Sam sometimes doesn’t consider a lot of these levels when telling us his opinion. His analogies he uses during class sometimes ramble and go on and on, and I think he’s not quite articulate enough to be able to get the point across clearer and simpler. I often find it hard just to follow what he’s saying and understand what side he’s on at the end of his analogies.
Having said that, though, this is Sam’s class and it’s his platform to speak. He has the right to broadcast his opinions and I think he’s certainly earned that with his years of education studying to become a sociologist, and with the many years since then seemingly traveling the world to see first-hand the many different social problems humans face. I would consider him an expert on the topics we discuss in class, and I think he’s certainly qualified to teach 700 kids about sociological issues.
But the majority of this class is stubborn 19-, 20- and 21-year-olds that think they have the world in their pocket and have a grasp on it all. I’m one of those kids. We all are. I would hope that Sam knows this, and the student in this video I hope will realize this too. We’re not likely to change our opinions on anything. That’s the nature of the beast when you teach young college students, who are anxiously trying to speed up the process of becoming an adult.
But what Sam does well, and I hope he knows this, is that he gets students to think. He gets students to think about the subject, and think about what their own opinion is. There’s no doubt that the minds of students turn more during SOC 119 than during 90 percent of the other classes at Penn State. He discusses, tells us his opinion, and expects us to consider all the facts before making our decision. Going into many of these lessons, plenty of students probably don’t even have a real, sound opinion either way on the material. But by promoting discussion and thinking, Sam assures that every student will form one by the end of class. And if that’s not the case, then that’s okay. With the execution of this blog, if kids don’t have an opinion on one of the topics by 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then they’ll certainly have an opinion by midnight on Friday.

Affirmative action, in many circumstances, will correct itself in the long run. In this example, those that are unqualified will prove to be unprepared once they get their foot in the door, and will essentially weed themselves out. The ones that succeed after being given that chance will prove that the system does work, and that all they needed was a little affirmative action to give them a chance. Thus, the quality of people isn’t necessarily going down when you consider that anyone that goes through medical school and successfully becomes a doctor apparently had the necessary qualifications to begin with. The main problem is that there are plenty of better qualified people that also would have made it that got rejected and never got a chance.

Even though Sam doesn’t necessarily want to hear this, I’m going to say that this is sick and disgusting. As far as whether this is a result of some weird, deep, inner process that is occurring inside everybody on the planet, I don’t really know. Is Sam implying that people, as a whole, are getting more disturbed? I think if that’s the case, then it’s a result of the technological boom over the last 20 years, especially the internet. People’s weirdest and wildest families can come true just by a simple Google search. Every fetish imaginable can be satisfied if you know how to use the Internet. I think that the creation of this video game is just another similar advancement (probably a poor word choice).

It seemed to me that the people in the beginning of this video were being ignorant of their ancestors and the battles they went through. There is a reason the word Negro is on the Census, and it’s for the older blacks that still use that term to identify themselves. Of course I understand that the word is very sensitive and often considered derogatory today, but the United States government and the U.S. Census Bureau are trying their hardest to identify the racial breakdown as best as possible in this country. Every race needs to be represented accurately, and if that means putting an uncomfortable term on the list that is more easily identifiable for older black men and women, then so be it. I almost wish Raquel Cepeda had explained this to those people that were so outraged at the inclusion of this word.
It’s just a result of the changing times that we live in. The news anchor said that the Census said the word will be removed from the next Census in 2020, as the population of older blacks that lived during the Civil Right Era will have shrunk much smaller. But where does that leave us? Who knows, new words may spring up in the next 40 years that more accurately define certain races, and with that, words that are used on this Census may evolve into derogatory terms. 50 years from now, those words may still exist on the Census, and people may get in a similar upheaval over it. But the goal here is to learn what we can about all the different races, right? And be able to appreciate and look at them all in the same way? In order to get to that stage, we’re gonna have to deal with these “bumps in the road” and eventually, we may end up in a world where race issues no longer need to be talked about.
As far as how to include the people that feel they are mixed races, I think the Census needs to be careful and ask that people choose the one race that they most identify with. Of course when you really look at your ancestral history, everyone is of mixed races. But we can’t have white people – like the white woman in the video almost suggests – check down multiple boxes other than white on the Census. The Bureau needs to get the most accurate information, and it can’t allow people checking 5 or more boxes when that’s really not their racial make-up, even though they like to think that. Allowing people this freedom is nice, but if people start taking advantage of it too often, then it will begin to become a problem.