Although Determinism is a strong factor in our lives, I feel that and free will work together in order to lead you down a certain path of life. There are people that are born into wealthy families that end up being the poorest or poor and there are those who come from nothing and through the decisions they make in their lives they are able to make something of themselves and be where they want to be in life. Determinism should not define who you are and what you want to be. But Determinism may constrict from certain things. For example being a minority or a women may not get you as far as being a white man but even if thats the case people should't let determinism overpower their freewill and freedom to make life altering decisions.

I feel like a huge factor of me being at penn state has to do with free will. The cards that I was dealt aren't really the best of cards. I come from of a family with two Haitian immigrants who came to the United States twenty years ago. Although my father was successful in Haiti, coming to the States quickly changed his economic status. When entering PSU, my family situation is currently not of the greatest. I have only one working parent and I still needed $12,000 in order to attend school here, money that we did not have nor did we see where it was going to come from. The cards that I was dealt told me and my family that I shouldn't be a Penn State student, that I would probably be better off at the Community College of Philadelphia. But through my own free will and the decisions and actions that my family and I took, I was able to attend a great university.

While reading this piece "Remember" written by a prison inmate I went through a series of emotions and questions in my head. Does being under certain situations really put things into perspective? Do you "remember" what is truly important while weaning out the things that have no significance at all? The points and events in our lives that are seem "important" and "memorable" at the time are really just moments in time that will be soon forgotten. But it is the life changing events and the events that led up to it that are really what we remember. My heart goes out for the inmate that wrote this, the factors that changed his life is all that he can remember. Not when he was last visited or last loved but all he remembers is the reason, the person whose life he took that got him there in the first place. A time in his life when it is the norm to drink and be merry turned into him having to pay the cost of his actions with the rest of his life.

Reading a letter from a person that's in jail is something that I can say I never expected to experience in my life. Reading this letter has made me realize that people actually do go to jail, human beings are stripped from their simple freedoms and confined into a place where their freedom isn't their own. There are those who only have to go through this for x amount of years but there are those who will never get the lives they had back again. The simple things that we enjoy in our everyday lives are actually things we take for granted. But are we in the same situation as most of these prisoners? Through Soc 001 I'm coming to realize that we in fact are also in prison. Although it may not be the same freedoms that we are deprived of but we are also constricted from truly being free. As Sam Richards said, how can we have the freedom to speak against our president but not be able to grow a plant in OUR homes and use it for OUR personal use? How much freedom do we REALLY have? Many of us don't realize how un-free we are because we are the "fish still inside of water." We don't realize the situations we're in because we are so immersed in our own worlds. If we just took the time to actually step back then we would all realize that we are all lie prisoners to these hidden structures of sociology.

Soc 001 and Soc 119