It is only natural for humans to be jealous of others who have more than them, even if it is someone as close as a family member. In almost all of the stories mentioned in the article, family members and friends of the winner asked for money and gifts for various reasons. If the person with the money gives that money away, they feel like people are taking advantage of them. But if they refuse, their family and friends become angry, causing strain in their relationships. So it is almost a certain lose-lose situation for someone coming from a lower class, especially since their friends and family are most likely also in need of money. Not to mention the ever-present threat of burglary or even murder, as stated in the article. Greed and jealousy also causes these people to attack lottery winners in order to steal thier money. Obviously, I would still want to win the lottery, but after looking at it from this perspective, it does not seem quite as desirable.
Material possessions can bring happiness to a certain point, as mentioned in the article, but just because someone has the money to buy anything they want does not mean that those goods will make them happy. Happiness and joy come from relationships with others much more than it comes from wealth. And in most occaisions, when a person wins the lottery, their relationships actually become worse off than they were before, mainly from jealousy and greed. These are the other reasons for the misfortunes of people who have won the lottery.
.I believe that most of the problems that these people face are a direct result of their inability to shift from one social class to another. It is very difficult for someone of lower class to suddenly try to take on the lifestyle of an upper class citizen. They try to spend their money on large houses and expensive cars, in an attempt to fit in to the upper class. But although they may get a good feeling from spending all that money, once they realize that the rich lifestyle is not what they thought it would be, they often become depressed and sometimes wish they had never won the money in the first place. As they always say, money can't buy happiness.
However, no one in Congress wants to see this happen, for the most part because many of them depend on these same companies to finance their campaigns. Because these members of government feel the need to reciprocate the bribe they took to get into office, they fail to realize how much good this money could do if it was used for other things. if the four billion dollars that Obama wants to take out of subsidies could be used to research alternatives to oil, we would undoubtedly be able to develop a cheap way to provide energy that would save us the trouble of having to rely on oil as our main energy source. Not to mention the people who are negatively affected in a negative way by the oil companies, such as people who's wells have become contaminated by chemicals used in the drilling process. It seems as if the only ones benefitting from this are members of Congress and the oil company executives. But as long as our government is run by a system of legalized bribery, as described in class, problems like this will continue to arise and cannot be avoided.
In the eyes of Americans, oil is the most important resource in the world. The more oil we have, the better, and our government will do just about anything to control as much of the resource as possible. Over the past decade, we have had a continuous militarty presence in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan (obviously the first few years were in response to the September 11th attacks, for which the response was needed) and newly added to the list, Libya. Of course, as they always say, the reason we need to have so much influence in the region is to spread democracy, and to stop terrorism. But most of us know that the ulterior motive here is that the government wants to get more oil. Everyone has seen the effects of these actions overseas, but now this want for oil at all costs is starting to affect us at home. This article talks about how President Obama wants to cut the subsidies going to oil and natural gas companies in the United States.
There are so many invisible factors that contribute to someone's sexuality, and this video makes the argument that being raised is a homosexual environment is not one of the major factors. The speaker also talks about how his family was similar to normal, traditional families. His argument inspires one to wonder what he woud actually be like if he had been raised by heterosexual parents. As mentioned before, I believe that his unpbringing in a homosexual household was one of many factors that made him who he is today. There have been so many other factors in his life, ones that we cannot see or understand, that affected him in other ways, and that he would probably have turned out very similar if he had been raised by heterosexual parents.
Although this is only one case, he speaks for millions that have been treated unequally because others know that their parents are homosexuals, when they would have been treated equally if no one knew that they were a child of a gay couple. Many say that children who grow up in a homosexual setting are more likely to become gay themselves, versus growing up in a regular heterosexual family. But as we learned in class, these children are not more likely to become gay simply from growing up in a household of gay parents.
The speaker in this video makes a very compelling argument as to why same sex partners should be allowed to raise children in our society. He cites many examples of his accomplishments as proof that he was uneffected by the fact that he was raised by two mothers. The most interesting argument he makes, from my point of view, is that he had never been confronted by someone who had independently realized that he was a child of same sex parents. I find this so interesting because this man has undoubtedly met countess numbers of people in his life, many of whom probably despise and speak out against gay partners' raising of children. So, if these people who are so against the raising of children by same sex partners can't even distinguish a child of gay marriage from other heterosexually raised children, how could they possibly say that this could hurt our society? If we cannot tell if someone was raised by gay parents, then we obviously find these people to be quite as norman as ourselves, and they should be treated that way.
The politicians using the r-word are not trying to offend those with mental disabilities, they are trying to insult someone else. However, since they apparently haven't been informed that the r-word is no longer accepted as politically correct, their insults towards political opponents are seen as insults towards mentally handicapped people. I am not trying to defend these politicians in any way, I am simply stating that everyone needs to be better informed about the hurt that this word can cause and that we should all avoid using it completely.
But now that we have entered a new age of political correctness, new terms are being used to replace old words that have become known as negative statements. It is similar to the way that there have been many "politically correct" terms for homosexuals in the past that are now considered to be offensive. People who consider this word to be offensive, myself included, only think this way because society tells them to think this way. I agree that the word should be considered as offensive and that its use should be avoided as much as possible, however, I am also saying that most people who use this word have little or no idea how offensive it actually is. The examples in the video show this.
![[Avatar]](/images/avatar26.png){kind=avatar}
Production