News Importance.

I was looking on CNN this morning and I saw something that was very shocking to me. Between the stories of President Bush going to Baghdad, New England's people freezing because of their recent storm with no power, and Pakistan being related to Terror plots in the UK, Jennifer Aniston was mentioned about posing with no clothing on for a magazine. Is our country really that superficial that people dying and our President trying to prove a point is equal to a magazine cover? I don't really know what to say about how our country should change our values but something else from the media shocked me today. I was sitting downstairs with my parents when my dad drew my attention to the fact that any sort of news about the war has moved to the back of the paper. Do we no longer care about our soldiers and our war? It's scary to me to think that while we have thousands of men and women fighting a war for us so far away, we do not have the decency to mention them on the front page. I want to know if I am the only one who thinks this is crazy, our maybe I just took all this the wrong way, but it feels to me like America needs to change it's priorities.

I was looking at the comments on my blog today and I saw the one that Mr. Bolos left on mine and I wanted to address it...   "So the question of WHY keeps coming to mind? Why does the "news" spend more time on the Aniston than on the Taliban?"

I think the reason that people talk about Jennifer Aniston and all of the stars of hollywood because they are to scared to talk about the war.  They want to avoid the topic because it has such an impact on our country.  People going to lunch and having children and wearing an expensive dress are things that are easier to talk about then people in pain and dying for this country.  No magazine or newspaper wants to lose stories so they go with stories that will make people interested.  Many people everyday do not want to read something sad because many feel that they have their own problems and also they hear about sadness from other sources such as other people, the internet, or the TV.  I hope that soon people will get over their fear of sad knowledge.  We all want to support our troops and help them, but we should start by informing ourselves about what is happening to them.

Drinking age

This was oringinally going to be a comment on Victoria's blog but I felt as though it was too long to put there, so props to Victoria for giving me the idea!

In America politicians are considering lowering the drinking age to I believe about 18. It is a controversial issue because parents are worried that their kids will look at this oppurtunity to get alcohol and run wild. But it is difficult to judge... In other countries such as France, the drinking age is significantly lower then ours and the kids seem to be alot less interested in alchohol. Now, people could just say thats not true but this summer I went to France and I was able to see how two girls lived there.
One girl was a year younger then I was and I had just met her, and the other was my age and I have known her for a very long time. When I stayed with the younger girl, we went to dinner and then went to go hang out with her friends. When we sat down immediatly a couple kids ordered beers. It was a weird experience for me, in America as you all know, that's illegal! After dinner we went to go hang out and kids brought beer but it was not even a big deal to them, they just passed a few out and went on just doing what they were doing. Now people can say that that experience was different then the rest of the world, and that was one group of kids. But later that week I stayed with the girl who was my age. We were hanging out with her friends and thankfully I could speak in English! I asked her how France was different from America and how the cultures differed. She started talking about how alcohol was less in demand from french teens because it was not a big deal. She thought that the lowered age made a Huge difference in the amount of teens getting completly wasted and blacking out. She of course followed up by saying that of course there were still the kids who went that far, but it was far less common.
Now, just from those two experiences I got the vibe that because the drinking age is lowered, the kids do not care about alcohol as much. I feel as though if the politicians followed France in that movement that maybe there would be less American teens going out there and going crazy. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, but I do feel as though since nothing else is working to make American teens slow down, we should give this a try.

The Crucible

Listening to the discussion in class today about the new book we are reading, "The Crucible" I thought that talking about the author and the way he wrote it would make a good blogpost. The author of the book, Arthur Miller starts the book in saying that he actually toned the book down by adding age to one of the characters, and making the amount of victims smaller. This was a very strange thing for me to hear. In American society we are used to everything being hyped up. You see a movie that says based on a true event, and the most they have in common are the names of the people(not all the time) and a basically similar storyline. People in our country have become desensitized on their own because of the material they have been shown. While talking about the rights people have in class today as well, we talked about what could be considered pornographic. Can gore and blood and scare be considered too much for people to comprehend?
The idea that really makes me think is that this author did not want the story to be any worse then it was originally. I have yet to start the book, so if he really wanted to make the book sound less severe then it already sounds, what frightening things could be hiding in the pages? We always get to tell ourselves during scary movies that its not real, or this is a complete exageration, but in this book we dont get that privilage.

Sarah Palin

This is a post from my first blog...

Govener Sarah Palin is running for VP alongside Senator McCain for this years election as well all know. My question is did McCain choose her because he thought that she could truly someday be president of the United States, or because she can help him win the election? Also, does he think that women who wanted Hillary to win will decide to vote for Palin because she is a woman? Palin seems to believe that she has the vote for women covered in her statement in an article on MSNBC. She states, “It turns out the women of America are not finished yet and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all," which seems to me like she is implying that women should vote for her to make sure women finally get into the Oval Office.

Norman Rockwell

During the last few breaks in AIS I have been looking around the room and seeing new things. One poster that really caught my eye was a poster in the front of the room on the left. It is a poster of two groups of children staring at eachother. One of the groups appearts to be a black older brother and black younger sister. The other group is three young white boys. Its interesting because they sister of the boy is holding a white cat and the boys have a black dog. Also, the African American family seems to be moving into the neighborhood because of the moving truck behind them. The poster reminded me alot of Fires in the Mirror. The african american family is looked at as if they are a different species by the young boys, just as the jews and blacks viewed eachother in Crown Heights. I wonder what time the poster was made and I also wonder if it has any relation to the book. They seem to be very connected and I thought that noticing it really brought the book to a finally to me.

Fires in the Mirror

For homework this weekend we were supposed to read in the book again and find another 5 words and talk about the connotations they have. It was hard for me to find most of the five words because I try and see through the speakers perspective when reading instead of as a reader. The only word that stuck out at me as I was reading was the word race in parenthesis. It was interesting how the speaker made the word almost neutral by the way she used parenthesis. She made the word seem as though it was something that did not exsist, or something that was imaginary. It was weird for me to think that it was that easy to make something neutral, and I wonder if you can put parenthesis around all words and make them like that.

Senate Bailout

Just this afternoon, the senate voted to have to $700 billion bailout. This means many problems for our generations social security. With this money taken, there will be none left for our generation when we retire. This is very frightning because it means we will have to work longer and have to conserve and save much more money over our lifetimes. The house still has yet to vote so I'm hoping that they will turn down the bill. For our future, lets hope they do.

Re-do

Alright, so I had to re-create my blog this weekend because unfortunatley it decided to not work for me. Thankfully this one likes me and there are no problems!