I’m glad that this was put on the blog. I was interested right away when Sam mentioned that he and Laurie visit the inmates at Rockview. All I know about Rockview is that it’s a pretty creepy place. But I don’t know anything else about it. Visiting the inmates is a unique act of community service, but I just wonder how he and Laurie got started in going there in the first place.

That all being said, I enjoyed the letter that the inmate wrote for our class. It could have been written by any one of my friends. But the letter didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. I know that people are people are people, and this includes people who are in prison. I know that some people are hard-pressed to find the humanity in the inmates in jails, but it is still there in some way.

I think that prison life is fascinating. I have a lot to say about the justice system in America. I believe that in other countries, DNA is collected for most crimes, not just ones for which it is required in tests. In the countries that do this, DNA evidence, I’ve heard, can prevent a lot of convictions in which the person was actually innocent. I can’t help but think that there must be so many people who are wrongfully incarcerated that it’s just so sad. The legal system fails a lot of people.

Another thought that comes to mind for me is this: How hard is it to resist killing another person? Is it really that hard to refrain from killing another human being? I don’t think it’s hard to just NOT kill someone. But apparently, sometimes people just kill other people because they need to. But why do they need to kill each other? How about just walking away instead? In this instance I’m inclined to say that people get what they deserve when they do the wrong thing. Just by killing another human being doesn’t take all your problems away. I’m not trying to over simplify the problem here, but I think that if we look at violence and other things more simply, then we start to see that people act rather impulsively.

Some people do belong behind bars though. But I think that we could better use convicted criminals for other things. I think that if consequences for crimes were more unpleasant, than crimes wouldn’t be committed as much. Yes, I realize that life in jail is not the best thing in the world. But there are worse things, such as being used for FDA testing. If people knew that the consequences they’d be facing would be worse than life in prison, maybe people would think twice about killing each other. I know that this is kind of a silly argument, but it makes sense to me. I might be exaggerating a lot about these things, but looking at the issue objectively might be more interesting. That’s all I can say.

To the girl in the video: thank you for sharing this with us.

It’s unfair to have a whole group of people represented by a few extremists. It’s even worse, I think, when it’s a group that claims to be “fighting” on behalf of a religious belief. There are so many ways to interpret any kind of religion that one small sect cannot represent the entire contingent of followers. But sadly, that’s what happens, due to a human fear of the unknown and a general disinterest to be proven wrong in one’s perception of a people. We like it when we’re right, and we like it even more when our assumptions are correct because then we can say “I told you so”.

I don’t like that your husband is bombarded by things like that, misrepresenting his beliefs. For anyone to see that, whether they are Christians, Muslims, or Pagans (like me), it’s not easy to take it sitting down. When I see things that are so extreme and just wrong in fatual information, whatever they are, I want to just punch the person spreading the misconceptions. Sometimes I feel like that’s the only thing that will stop people from spreading lies: physical violence. But then I remember that the person I’m mad at can crush me with their fist or has enough extremist followers to crush me that way.

One thing that I try to do in particular, on campus, is to tell people what Paganism is. Recently, I gave a presentation at the library on campus to a small audience about the differences between Paganism and witchcraft, because the common misconception is that they are the same thing. They’re completely separate and different in their own ways. But that’s something that the group I’m involved with, Silver Circle, tries to do.

Also, I feel like if we educate children when they’re young, and actually talk about religion in a secular setting, we would enable them to learn about so many other things. A lot of practices, politics, and life in general are dictated by what higher power (or lack thereof) that we believe in.

But seeing something you love, your religion, slandered and represented wrongly on television everyday in the news and in other media is hurtful and causes a lot of pain. Most of the time, it would probably just make you feel helpless if you hear it enough. It seems like your husband might feel this way, but I don’t want to assume that I could know how he feels. I just hope that one day he won’t have to feel that way anymore.

As I said earlier in this post, people don’t like to be wrong. Being wrong can make people feel like they’re stupid, but it’s really not a matter of intelligence all the time. It’s a matter of doing your research. We don’t seem to encourage learning just for the sake of learning here in the US. That’s something that I want to change, if not in my classroom, then with my own children.

First of all, I like the examples that you gave about the ways that people abuse the welfare system. I had known briefly about them all, but it’s another thing to list them all out. By doing that, it kind of makes welfare seem like a bogus system and one that shouldn’t be in place. But I think that it’s a necessary thing to think about, when you think about all the people that do abuse the system.

You can think about all the people that abuse the welfare system, but for every person that abuses it, there has to be someone that is abiding by the regulations that does not abuse it. It would be wrong in my opinion to completely cut off everyone, because then you’d be cutting off people who are actually playing by the rules. I don’t know statistics about welfare that would correlate to that point, but there are two sides of the welfare story: people who cheat the system, and people who do not cheat the system.

I think that the current welfare system does need revamped. It needs some reworking. But to just cut everyone off completely is probably not the best way to do it. I agree and think that people need have some sort of motivation to get off of welfare. But what does that kind of motivation look like?

I think that it might be a good idea to have some sort of technical training program for people who would be on welfare, so that they could develop skills to use in the workforce to make money on their own. But that also costs money, and since that is the main reason that people don’t like welfare, it seems kind of contradictory to spend more money at the same time to potential motivate people. It might be too experimental, and then you’d get bad results in terms of people taking initiative for their own lives.

Sometimes I just wonder what people who are unemployed or on welfare do with their time, since they aren’t working at a job. I’ve held some sort of job since I was 13 years old, and now that I’m 20, I have a major disdain for people my age who don’t work at all. Granted, we are students, but I think that living off of someone else’s money just makes for lazier and more lame human beings. Some people I know just like to have the free time to be bums, and to party, and to not have additional responsibility. But those people are students and are actually doing SOMETHING, as opposed to never having deadlines or due dates. But I digress.

When I think about welfare, the first people that I think about are people that actually need it. My mind does not initially jump to the people who abuse the system. I think about welfare in better terms than some people (and probably unrealistically, but that’s beside the point) and that just brings out more empathy in me for the people on it. But I think that we need to look at those who might be more disadvantaged and empathize with them before denouncing the system completely. But that’s just my opinion. :-/

Hi everybody! I’m the girl in the video. Thanks for watching! I appreciate your comments, since I couldn’t actually talk to all of you face to face, I figured that this might be a way to get some answers.

For the record, my video is 17 seconds long – that isn’t really enough time to clarify everything that I wanted to ask. Let me clarify now!

1) I did not intend to attack the male portion of the population. If my question was received in that way, I’m sorry it was misinterpreted. However, I’m not sorry for asking the question in the first place.

2) My second question was more of a funny comment, but I really wanted you all to think about it too. I wanted people to think about the divide in services that are provided for men and women. I think that women seem to face more issues regarding their bodies (and by “issues” I mean biological function). Since there seem to be more biological processes in a women’s body than a man’s, it is only fair to raise a question about something specific to a woman. Then again, I am a woman, so I am kind of biased on this topic. But that’s why I wanted input!

I don’t blame the men in the class for the way that the lesson deteriorated. And I don’t blame the women. I don’t blame anyone! But I think that you were all really sophomoric and childish just because we mentioned something that you weren’t comfortable with. Instead of freaking out and letting the class fall to pieces, how about just sitting quietly and thinking? I can’t say that I was uncomfortable in class when this topic came up. I was very comfortable and interested. But there have been times in class that I’ve felt kind of odd and not wanted to be there. Instead of freaking out and yelling to my friends and at the instructor, I sat quietly and thought about my reaction. I think that we all could have done better in class that day.

Ladies! Be proud of your body and its’ functions. Don’t be ashamed. I am not equating embarrassment with shame. Embarrassment is perfectly ok. But don’t be ashamed. The same goes for the fellows in the room. Any bodily function can be discussed in a way that is not crude or disrespectful. This goes for menstrual cycles, urination, defecation, ejaculation, and everything else.

Gentlemen. Appreciate the function of bodies that are not your own. Be intrigued by something that you find unfamiliar. The reason that you are on this planet largely depended upon your mother’s ability to bear children. This requires a menstrual cycle. It is beautiful and a rite of passage. Your girlfriends bleed, your sisters bleed, and so did your mothers.

A large part of the problem is the way in which we communicate to each other as men and women. Respect is crucial in sensitive conversations, and so is word choice. I can talk to any man or woman about bodily function, so long as we keep the terms correct (no slang) and functions accurate.

I’m glad that a comment I made to a camera made at least one person think.

Condom issue! You’re all relating them to my tampon question, but you really can’t if you want to keep the discussion logical. You can’t cite condoms as an analogy for something that men obtain compared to tampons as something that women obtain. By saying that, it is implied that women are not the ones that go get the condoms. This is simply not true. Everyone, regardless of sex, should get condoms if they are planning in engaging in a sexual act that requires them. Apart from that fallacy of logic, condoms are used to protect both parties involved in a sexual act, while tampons are exclusive to women’s needs.

/rant

But women need to buy deodorant, shaving cream, and toilet paper too. Those aren't things specific to men at all.

“Is it just me or does this woman talk like she's mildly ditsy or trying to at least give off too much of a girly persona?”

Wow, judgmental much? Don’t berate a successful woman (or person in general) for how they speak. That’s rather rude, I would say. She is speaking in a voice that she speaks in everyday. I’m sure she has not completely changed her speech patterns or lexicon simply for the sake of an interview.

“Maybe she wants to keep her feminine side in tact and show that she's not butch?”

I feel as though you are implying that her “feminine side” would not remain intact unless she otherwise attempted to preserve it, because she is coaching football. Not everyone has the strongest “feminine side” whether they are male or female, but I believe that she is allowed to be as feminine, masculine, or anything that she wants. She is allowed to be as “butch” as you would peg her. Perhaps she would peg you as a jerk.

So, cnr5034, you state in your blog entry that you “don’t know anything about football”. Who are you to say that she needs to “be tougher on the field if she wants to win”? Toughness is not all that counts in sports, whether you are male or female, coach or player. Endurance counts. Love of the sport counts. Teamwork counts. Stop and think about that for a moment, please, since you admitted that you don’t know anything about it. You also stated “What does a girl know about football?” I guess that you’re in the same boat as the women that you seem to despise. I’m glad; it might be enlightening for you.

“So she's a coach for young football players, for young men? Ok fine I'll stop, I'm critiquing her way too much…Who knows maybe someday we'll be seeing buff guys teaching little girls to do ballet.”
There is also nothing wrong with men, “buff” or otherwise, teaching ballet or being a ballet dancer themselves. Since you don’t know anything about football (your words, not mine), maybe you didn’t know that some football and other professional athletes take various forms of dance in classes (ballet included!) to gain better footwork agility skills. Does that make them more feminine and not manly enough to play a big, rough, tough sport? NO. It makes them better players.

End rant.

Personally, I think that Ms. Randolph is a beautiful, qualified, no-nonsense woman, based on viewing her interview. I think that given the questions she received from the anchorwoman, she answered in a respectful and intelligent manner.

Having the same sex organs as the players on your sports team does not necessarily make you a better coach. Likewise, having different sex organs does not make you a better coach. The things that make you a better coach than other people are a devotion to the game and the players, which Ms. Randolph clearly displays. I am thrilled that a woman has broken into coaching a sport that has been dominated by men. Gender roles and expectations can cloud the judgment of people who are not customarily used to having things go against the societal norms. Fuck gender roles, and achieve to the best of your abilities.

Just a note for everyone responding to this particular blog entry: the corporation that owns Abercrombie and Fitch and Hollister is notorious for this kind of discrimination. Ironically, this company also owns Hot Topic, so it’s just kind of funny that this kind of conformity is shown in the employees of all their stores.

The employees of these stores have to sell the clothes in the store. In order to do that, the employees are selected to best portray the kind of people who will wear these clothes. It’s not the right thing, but it is what happens. I think the greater root of the problem is not religious or cultural discrimination, but that corporations can tell employees how to look. That is something that I’m concerned about already, because I’m an elementary education major, and I have visible piercings and want more tattoos. (But this a completely other story – I just don’t like being told what is acceptable and unacceptable to look like.)

My friend Sam is ethnically Jewish. He does not adhere to the religion of Judaism, but he is Jewish. He applied to work at Hollister and he did get the job. But (as he put it) he’s not “man pretty” enough to work on the floor. He was employed to be a stock room worker instead. He took it in stride, because he didn’t really need to be out on the floor. His self esteem wasn’t crushed by their decision. He just needed a job to make money. He’s more apathetic than this young woman in the video, but her discrimination suit is more compelling and evident in elements of discrimination than his was.

Fellow SOC 119 students, can you verify something for me? When you work for Abercrombie or Hollister, isn’t your title (if you work on the floor) that of a “model”? I think I heard that somewhere before, but I don’t remember where, so the validity of that notion is compromised. Can anyone who has worked there clarify that for me? Because if that’s true, than it just strengthens the idea that this corporation hires the people that it does in an elitist way. I have a real problem with a person’s validation solely coming from the clothing brands that they wear. It’s just extremely shallow, and that’s why I legitimately try to not associate with those people. Call that discrimination if you want to, but I don’t care. I’m going to generalize that anyone decked out in head to toe labels from one store has some problems with their image and self perception that can’t actually be fixed by the clothing that they wear.

However, in this country, we are (for now) allowed to dress in a manner that we see fit, and we are allowed to apply for any job that we want. The situation of this young woman is really appalling on Abercrombie/Hollister’s end, but I’m glad that there is a lawsuit being pushed on them. The fact of the matter is that they were wrong because they went back on an agreement, plain and simple.

But I have to ask readers of this blog – will you continue to shop at a store that treats their employees this way? I don’t and haven’t for years because I’ve heard about all this crap before, and it sickens me to support someone profiting from being a dick. Will you all continue to support people and corporations like this for clothes that you don’t really need? Tell me – I want to know.

I completely agree with Will in the first video on this post. Not only is he absolutely right, but I think that he used the perfect words to describe the common attitude of people when they see such blatant discrimination.

I have never (to my knowledge) personally witnessed such outrageous behavior targeting a person such as the Muslim woman in the video that we viewed in class. I think that showing that video was a wonderful learning tool and an effective way to get a point across to the entire class. Having said that, I am horrified that if I were witness to such a situation that I might be in the bystander group that took no direct action. I most certainly would not be in the smallest group, the number of people encouraging the bakery worker. As a decent human being I could not encourage such juvenile behavior. But I hope that I would be so outraged enough at even the smallest injustice that I would really stick it to that racist and xenophobic jerk.

I know that it could be really hard for some people to put themselves in the shoes of the Muslim woman featured in the video. The only way that I can imagine fitting into her shoes is being discriminated against because I am a Pagan. However, that is not something about myself that shows outwardly so explicitly, so I don’t even think that my example is really an accurate comparison. I just know that if I were in her situation that I would want someone to help me. I’m no damsel in distress, but it helps to know that even a complete stranger might have your back in an unfriendly setting.

The sad fact is that a lot of people don’t take action for certain things, like obvious discrimination, because they really believe that it’s not their place to do so, or that it’s none of their business. There are things that happen and have been happening everyday for years that are unjust, but nobody does anything about them. The only examples that I can think of at the moment are examples that involve the inequalities between men and women, such as less pay for a woman than a man who does the same job when they both have the same ability and qualifications. But I think that the reason that nothing changes is because we’re afraid. We’re afraid for ourselves.

In order to solve injustices and do something, it involves the act of putting oneself out on the line for someone that they might not know, care about, agree with, or even personally like. But those aren’t the important things to be thinking about when we see injustice. The act of putting yourself out there for someone else is a scary thought. It was even scary when we were little kids and saw someone getting picked on at school during recess. But the kids that said something to the bully were the ones who did the right thing. We need to start doing the right thing and defend our fellow human beings. Building relationships is what this is all about, and things like that can be done between complete strangers when circumstances are such. We need to care. We need to care enough. That’s all there is to it.

I have some points and questions for you, jpm5107. Please get back to me. I am interested in your argument, and would really appreciate it if you would engage me in a conversation.

You wrote in your response that “Most major religions in this country have the same beliefs.” You seemed to indicate that this was part of your reasoning as to why recognizing GLBT relationships is wrong. Aside from the GLBT argument, did you think about people who do not make up the religious majority in America? Just because the majority can in fact hold a majority on a belief does not necessarily make them correct or right.

You also mentioned that strong family values have “helped our country get through many challenges over the years.” Would you mind giving me some examples? Because I can’t really think of anything. I want to understand your argument, and to do that, I and the other blog readers need those holes filled in.

In the same paragraph about “strong family values”, you indicated that American culture and values have gone awry due to the traditional family arrangement breaking down. Is it breaking down because of different family arrangements? I don’t think so. I think it’s breaking down because some people who should not have been married or have children actually did, and then got divorced. That literally breaks a family down. If a family is comprised of a loving adult and their child, two loving adults and no children, or anything possible, is that a terrible familial arrangement? Or does one parent have to have a vagina and one have to have a penis? Sex organs make all the difference in how we raise children, don’t they? I’m assuming that the parents would have to be naturally male and female, right?

Sex organs do not make you a suitable mother or father. They just make you able to BE a mother or father. I will never understand why one parent must be a woman, and one a man. I also will never understand why there needs to be two parents for a “traditional” and “suitable” family. My father died when I was 6, and I didn’t have a step-father for years after that. My mother made us the best family that I could have ever had when my dad died – she did her best, and we still felt loved and held together. I would assume that a lesbian would do the same if she were single for her children. It is what a responsible parent does, regardless of sexual orientation.

The point that I just made relates to one that you made in your blog entry. You stated “They [the children] will be brought up with either no father or mother figure. It doesn’t take a child psychologist to know their development will be hurt.” I believe that we went over a slide in class (slide number 38 in the slideshow titled “LGBTand Ethnocentrism”) that states that The American Academy of Pediatrics supports LGBT adoptions. I guess you (an probably a lot of other people) weren’t listening for that slide.

I think that it is quite a tragic thing when a language “dies”. I really wish that it never happened, just because I think that languages are really fascinating in general. I have a friend from India, and he can speak five dialects native to his region of India. It’s really amazing to me when people can speak multiple languages also, just because that’s so much information in your brain – I never was able to conjugate French verbs properly, so when other people can do technical things with languages that may or may not be related at all, I am amazed at their linguistic skills.

There is so much culture that is lost when a language dies. It’s culture that we can never hope to regain. Once something dies, it’s pretty hard to revive it.

The thing that makes me the most upset about the whole concept of language “death” is that they didn’t really have to die at all. Regarding the Bo language, I suppose that there was a limited number of people who were even around that had the capacity to learn it. But when I think about the Chemehuevi language, I feel as though people just didn’t put the time and the effort into learning something very central to their ethnic and cultural heritage. Granted, learning a language is not something that is easy to do, but things that are bigger than ourselves, such as cultural pride and responsibility to your people, make us work harder.

When I was thinking about the Chemehuevi language and others that are in danger of dying, I thought that perhaps anyone could just express an interest and go learn the language from the oldest speakers of it. I suppose that then, the problem is that if I were to do that as myself, a young white upper-middle class American of Irish heritage, I have no ties to the culture whose language that I would be learning anyway. I know that some things can be extremely sacred in other cultures, and language could quite possibly be one of those sacred things. Letting an outsider in just to learn the native language of a people strikes me as insulting in a number of ways. The act of passing on a language to another person is not usually a task that is academic. It is traditional, it is cultural, it is full of the history and the story of the ancestors that you have never seen. To bring in a language expert to learn and note all the aspects of a language, to have the elders and last speakers take the time to teach the outsider the language, and then to have the language and its’ semantics filed away in a leather bound reference book just seems extremely disrespectful.

I have to say that some languages just don’t seem modern enough to feasibly exist in the world as it is today. Ancient indigenous languages do not have words for “computer” or “batteries” or “microwave oven”. While, in their corners of the world, words such as these have no meaning or purpose, modern day requires a certain vocabulary. I’m not sure that it would be possible to even invent words in some languages, but I think that perhaps we can attribute some aspect of their “death” to the words in the language itself. I wish that such a thing were not true, since I think some types of progression in society are unnecessary, and I’m not even sure that a larger vocabulary could solve the problems of dying languages.