I thought that the video was actually very interesting. I watched the entire thing and thought it was very interesting how war has progressed through the ages. The video starts out very slow, with only explosions happening very rarely, and the ones that do happen are very small. Then, as Europeans begin to expand throughout the world, you see a slow increase in the explosions, and they also seem to be spreading out from the central part of Europe. Most of them still stay in Europe, but you can definitely tell a trend is forming as you see the explosions spreading and growing in frequency. I think that this shows the European mind set back in those days about conquering the world. Now, some of these wars do not involve Europe, but most do. And then we see the damages from the revolutionary war, and all of a sudden America is involved in creating these explosions. They don’t really do much damage in the beginning, but after the Civil War, after We really established ourselves as a power player, the explosions really start to pick up, especially with World War I and World War II. I just thought it was interesting how much both Europe and America are involved in the conflicts throughout the world. It very clearly shows our mindset in the world, and how we think of ourselves, and it all stems from our ancestors. Europeans way back when somehow got the mindset that they need to gain as much land as possible, and they have to be the strongest country, so that sparked many wars within Europe, then people started traveling outside of the borders and found more land to take, then it was just a big race to grab as much as possible. This kept happening throughout the ages. Then America became its own country, and they were made up of mostly Europeans, and so they started a brand new country with the same exact mindset as the Europeans, and ever since we have been trying to establish ourselves as the number one nation, which explains our position in world affairs today.

I have found the discussions we have been having in class about war, soldiers, and post traumatic stress disorder very interesting, mostly because all of this is getting closer and closer to affecting my life every day. I am in Penn State’s Army ROTC, and signed a contract in December of last year that locks me into eight years of mandatory service with the United States Army upon my graduation. Before I entered college and began this program, I had very little contact with anything military, and very little knowledge about the goings on in the current military. Even now, I wouldn’t really consider myself to versed in a lot of things, I know the things that they teach us in class very well, but the things that actually go on in the military, such as PTSD and dealing with the issues of being deployed, are not really mentioned much. We are required to watch a documentary made by the Army each year about these kind of things, but it is the same thing every time, and we only spend that one day watching the video and discussing it for a couple minutes, and then we forget all about it. In “ROTC Land” a lot of people take the Army for what we see in our training, and a lot of people in the program, including myself, joke around constantly. I know that we should take it more seriously, and that we need to mentally prepare ourselves for what we are really going to face in combat, but it is hard to do, because nobody wants to talk about it. I am not sure about the others in the program, but I know that it’s there, it is just a hard thing to talk about. As long as we are not in the direct situation, and we are not in imminent threat of it, it’s something that I like to pretend does not exist. This is how a lot of people feel, both in the military and in the civilian world, and I feel like the reason it is not talked about much is because people like to pretend it is not there, but it is and we need to start recognizing it and helping those suffering to deal with it, and try to help those in threat of it from reaching that point.

The oil companies get a lot of money all of the time, and have been for years and years. They get all sorts of breaks and what not from the government that they really do not need. The proposed cuts that Obama has been trying to get through congress would only take a small dent out of the top oil company’s overall profit. The article said that in the last ten years, the top five oil companies made a combined profit of over a trillion dollars, and given inflation and the expansion of the industry as a whole, they will most likely be making well over that in the next ten years to come. The proposed cuts are only a tiny little bit of their total profit, and shouldn’t be as hard as it has been to pass, especially when it will help our huge national debt get significantly lower with every passing year. Unfortunately, it is, and will be, very hard to get anything like this to pass through congress. Part of the reason for this is because of what we talked about in class this week. The oil company has pumped so much money into politician’s lives that it is very unlikely that those politicians will ever turn against them. It was a very smart move by the oil companies, because now that they are so cemented in Washington, they are set for generations to come. Also, the American public will be hard to convince to get all of this done. Though it seems like it would make sense for the American public to back these cuts for the oil company, the oil companies would not go down without a fight. They would put things out about how the politicians in Washington are attacking them, and how it will directly affect their lives by a large increase in gas prices. But this too is ridiculous and just another instance of oil companies being greedy. With the amount of money they bring in as a profit, they could take these yearly cuts and still make astronomical profits over the next ten years without raising prices at all. Raising prices would only be to maintain their current profits, which is ridiculous.

I knew that there was inequality in wealth throughout the different classes in America, but I never really thought about it in the way that it was brought up in class. I always believed what we were told is basically untrue, that everyone has the opportunity to rise or drop in classes, depending on what they do in their life, and to some extent I still do. The things that we learned in class definitely helped me look at the situation in a different light than I had before, and it gave me some really good insight into it. But, nonetheless, I still think that if someone in a lower or working class works to get into college and complete it, that if they work to a certain extent they can easily move up a class or two. I do not think that it is a common thing for people to jump, either up or down, multiple classes in their lifetime, but I believe that it is not such an outlandish thing to move up one class with enough hard work. I do not think that it is fair that people in the lower classes have to work harder to move up into a class that really isn’t all that much better, but I do believe that we need some type of separation like this in the country, just because I do not think that our economy would do too well without it. We have retailers that sell t-shirts for 3 dollars, and then there are retailers that will sell a shirt for over a hundred dollars, and hundreds of them in between. And I think that all of these different levels are important, because if everyone was at the same economic level, and all retailers sold around the same price goods, there would not be nearly as many stores. This can be placed in a number of different places in the country. With all people very close in their income a lot of things would not be the way they are, and many different aspects of our society would just not work. Now I am not saying that our society is perfect and needs no change, but I also don’t think that we would be any more satisfied in this alternate society either.

I think the article was very interesting. Honestly, I never really thought of what was mentioned in the article about religion. It is a really interesting concept though, that I think could very well be true in the near future. The data they had showed the trends that have been happening and that this is indeed an actual thing. They even had data all the way from 1860 in one country that showed a rate of decline in organized religion. Now, this rate may plateau at a certain point, but if it continues then we could indeed live in a world without organized religion. Not we as in us that are alive today, but certainly our future relatives will live in a world with some type of situation such as this. I think it is a very plausible prediction not only because of the data that the people had collected in the article, but also because of the way humans work. They even mentioned some stuff in the article about this, about the sociology of humans. Though these are not concrete things, sociology has a way of showing very reliable patterns throughout history. I, for one, would believe a prominent sociologist in their prediction of the future much more than I would a mathematician with some sort of data on the subject, just because they know the variability of humans as well as the practicality. Now if we bring these two studies together and they both agree on the same exact outcome, I believe that it could even be close to be taken as a future truth. The sociology perspective on this issue talks about people wanting to be with majority as opposed to the minority. And before that it’s probably just a combination of factors bringing people to denounce religion, and when they have children, they most likely will not believe in it either. But once the nonbelievers become the majority in populations, it will spread even further until religion is only something followed by those coming from a very strong lineage of very religious people, and even they might at some point stop. Interesting topic to think about.

I think this type of thing is very interesting, that if you take away sunlight for extended periods of time, you can see physiological changes in the person. I find it amazing how the body reacts to certain conditions. However, I do not see at all how the “invisible strings” we talk about in class have anything to do with this story. I’m sure they play a part in certain things that the people of Helsinki do, such as buy really big lamps, but they do not have anything to do with the way people feel. This story was about a disorder that people acquire from not getting enough sunlight, and that has to do with human biology, not sociology. They are not feeling depressed because of sociological issues, they are feeling depressed because of a chemical imbalance from a lack of sun light. The reason that the lamps work in helping with the depression is because it mimics sunlight, and it helps to regain some of that imbalance that was caused from not getting enough real light. People are not just getting happier because they are sitting in front of the light and they think they should be, they are not even technically getting happier. The one man in the video even says you do not really even notice anything while standing in front of the lamp every day, you just feel normal. It is when you take away the lamp that you notice the difference, showing that there is a strong biological component there. However, I do see some sociological pull in this video. The darkness in the winter made them create their own holiday where they celebrate light. Most people take it for granted, but when you only get a couple hours of it a day, it can become a great reason to celebrate. It probably also affects the way people do stuff on a daily basis, because it is a big city, and big cities are normally more dangerous to be around in the night time, but when the majority of the hours are night time, people living in the bad neighborhoods have to live a bit more on edge than during other times of the year.

This news story is one of the many reasons people have the irrational fears that they do about stranger abduction. From the time we are kids we are taught not to talk to strangers because strangers are bad people that will do bad things. But when you think about it, that does not make much sense. Most of the people that would abduct or harm a child have some sort of mental disorder, similar to rapists or murders. This off balance is not common at all. If it was as common as people are lead to believe than our mental asylums would be over flowing, and violent crime rates would be off the charts, its just simply ridiculous. Being taught all of this stuff is just the base of it all though, our society presents the rest of the puzzle pieces that lead to this unconventional fear. That is because kidnappings and other similar crimes are broadcast so widely and so often across the country. When one incident happens, everybody knows about it, and it is on every news station. We even have shows that focus just on the stories of people who have gone through these experiences. All of this leads us to believe that there are things like this happening all over the place, and the only way to protect ourselves is to stay on the alert at all times, always thinking about what could happen. I am not trying to sound as if I am saying we shouldnt try to protect our kids from certain tragedies, but we need to shy away from being so protective about it, because it could end up helping our kids. Just like Sam said in class, if we are taught to ask a stranger for help when we need it, your chances of getting better help faster are greatly increased. It would be the same if I was in trouble right now in the middle of a city. Say I needed an ambulance and I dont have my phone on me. Im not going to assume that I have to wait for a police officer or someone official to walk by because anyone else I ask is going to laugh at me or try to injure me further, I would ask the first person I saw because most peoples natural reaction is to help one another, and thats what we need to remember in these situations.

I guess I could say that this video was a bit shocking to me, but not because of the fact that the woman had three husbands, more just because of how different that culture is from ours. Personally, I do not agree with polygamy or polyandry at all, because that is how I was raised in the society that I live in. I was taught that you are supposed to have one partner at a time, and you get to pick who that partner is, and if you are happy you marry and stay with them forever, if you are not happy, you separate and seek someone else more fitting. But in other cultures that is not how things happen. And it is not because they have underdeveloped moral codes, or that they do not believe in love, it is because that is what they were taught to do for generations. This is just what they know to be right, and we cannot tell them otherwise because they are totally separated from our culture and our society. I see this issue as something similar to any other cultural difference between us and other places on the world. Think of our concept of food. When you get asked what you want for dinner, you know what comes to your mind. You ask someone else the same question in a different part of the world in a completely different society, they will say something completely different. We may see their choice in food not to be very good to us, but we acknowledge the fact that they are culturally different and that this is just what people from this area of the earth eat for dinner, and they probably think the same thing as you. And that’s that, we are done thinking about it. So why can’t we apply this same thinking to other culture’s marriage rituals? Sure it may seem weird and different from what we consider to be marriage, but they do not live in our society, so we should expect that they see things differently than we do, it’s just the way things are.

I do not think that it is that ridiculous that only thirty percent of Americans do not have passports. I think the article basically describes all of the main reasons why. A lot of it has to do with people not wanting to leave, because really, there is no reason to. Just like the article says, you can ski, go to a multitude of different beaches, parks, forests, deserts, amusement parks, anything you could want really. We also have such a rich culture in America, you can get a small dose of other cultures throughout the world fairly close to home. Now, it definitely is not the same as actually going to Europe, or going to Asia or wherever you want to go, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper, and that makes a huge difference. You could end up spending thousands of dollars on a vacation to a foreign place, which a lot of people just do not have to spare. Especially if there is a substantially cheaper option that gets you a fairly similar experience. Another big thing they talked about was the time commitment to traveling abroad. The article brings up the point that a plane ride to Europe from the east coast could be the same amount of time as one to the west coast, but that is not the only thing to take into consideration. First of all, that excuse can only be described for people on the northeast coast of the country, anywhere else would need at least one layover before they reach their final destination. Then you also have to take into consideration the time spent getting the passport, then going through customs, getting certain shots you need to get into certain countries. Traveling abroad is just a huge time commitment, both before and during travel. And once you get to the other country you are visiting, almost nobody speaks your language, and it is a lot harder to do stuff that you just take for granted in America. It is just a lot more logical to vacation in the US.

I had seen this clip a few times before, and whenever I had seen it, or something close to it, I always got a good laugh out of it and just saw it as an amusing little stint done for laughs. But if you dissect it a little more, and go a little bit deeper into why it was happening and what is actually going on here, it becomes a lot more interesting of a video. In the video it just shows the subject turning to face the direction that everyone else is. The reasoning behind it initially could be thought of that they want to avoid an awkward situation by having everybody sitting there staring at you. But it could also be looked at as the subject trying to fit in with the crowd, trying not to stand out too much. This is most likely the case. We are taught all our lives, from a very early age, that conforming to the crowd is the easiest way to get through life without any major problems. We are taught in schools to pick out the different one in a group of similar things, most of the people you see in the media fit a certain mold, and all of the people that are looked down on by society fit a mold too. That gets us yearning to fit in with the “good” group. We want to do what is popular, what everyone else is doing, so that we do not fall behind the pack, or even so we do not get exiled from the pack. There doesn’t even have to be any sort of specific person saying “do this or we won’t like you anymore”, it is just a natural pressure that is pushing us to do certain things. Everything is basically catered to the majority, it is a lot easier to find the clothes that are “in” right now than it is to find a shirt that mainstream society would look at as inferior. I can not say if I would turn in that elevator right now because I am not in that situation, but I am assuming that I, along with the vast majority of Americans, would turn with the crowd to a certain degree, for fear of looking like a fool.