Holy Cows

Mr. Bolos used the term "sacred cows" to describe the areas of government spending that are nearly impossible to reduce without receiving extensive criticism. These areas include Medicare, Social Security, and National Defense. This description helped me put a term to something that I had noticed while watching the State of the Union address. President Obama proposed that "annual domestic spending" be frozen for the next 5 years. This seemed to me like it may have been a move to reduce spending on one of the sacred cows, so I was intrigued. I did not fully understand what was meant by domestic spending, so I researched what the freeze entailed. It turns out the freeze really just meant that the salaries of government employees could not go up for 5 years, and the government could only use the currently available funds for domestic projects rather than increasing budgets. I also saw that the spending that this freeze affects makes up only of 13% of the U.S. budget, and therefore does not touch any of the aforementioned sacred cows. The fact that this spending freeze, although it may seem major, does not affect the sacred cows shows how powerful they really are. Although President Obama is making a great effort to show that he is making strides towards reducing spending, he still understands that the sacred cows cannot be touched.

Meta-Blog 2

Looking over this quarter in blog posts, I find that there is one thing my best posts have in common, something concrete that I based them off of. This could be a quote, a websight, or an event in my life. It seems that the bigger the connection I have to the topic of my blog, the better I can write and the more comfortable I am while actually writing the post. Something else I have noticed is that my two most recent posts were based off of opinions I hold that I would not commonly be willing to commit to publishing. However, my extensive use of the blog system over the last semester has made me more comfortable with publishing my opinions even though I understand that not everybody will agree with the things I say. I feel like being able to publish more one-sided posts as apposed to posts that simply bring up a question and support both sides is an improvement. I am actually starting to like the blog medium, because I am realizing how often I see something in everyday life that I hold an opinion about that I would like to share. All in all, I am definitely becoming more comfortable with the concept of blogging frequently. Quite honestly, I hadn't really seen myself as likely to use a blog, but I am finding out that the freedom of blogging can be very intriguing.

Parents, Kids, and Media

A few days ago I was watching an episode of Family Guy on hulu.com and an interesting advertisement was played during the break. The commercial showed a teenage kid playing what looked like a computer game and when his mother walked into the room, he closed the game so it looked like he was doing homework. Then a message something like this appeared "how can we know what kind of information our kids are getting from the other parent" (meaning media). The commercial was for a site called commonsense.org I was intrigued by the commercial so I paused the video and browsed around the website a bit. What I found, at least from my perspective as an adolescent, was rather disturbing. The site was largely based on instructing parents on how to control what media their children are exposed to. The two sections I read were about managing the music you let your kids listen to and monitoring the browsing history of your children. The section about music suggested that parents monitor songs purchased with iTunes because there was a chance that their child may have bought songs with *gasp* explicit lyrics! The idea that your teenage son/daughter will never be exposed to "adult language" if you are able to control what music they listen to seems rather far fetched to me. As for the article about checking the history on your teenager's computer, I was most disturbed by a section that suggested that if your kid's computer shows no history it means they have been "Covering their tracks" meaning that "they've been somewhere they think you don't want them to go". I can only speak for myself, but I set my browser to automatically clear the history whenever I close it simply because I don't like the idea of someone being able to look up all the sites I have visited. I feel like someone willing to do that could only have bad intentions. Anyway, my overall opinion of the site is that it encourages parents to try to control their children and force values upon them rather than trust them and allow them to become their own person. But that's just me, tell me what you think

Discretion in Dialing

When we find ourselves in dangerous situations, we always like to rely on the better-safe-than-sorry philosophy. This is a good policy most of the time, but what if we aren't the ones in danger? Recently, as many of you know, there was a misunderstanding recently at Washbourne School where a woman in Winnetka believed her husband was being held hostage at the school. After the school was surrounded with SWAT vehicles and many police officers and both New Trier campuses had been locked down, they discovered there was no gunman and the whole situation was borne of a butt-dial that the woman thought was the sounds of her husband being held hostage. Although because the situation is in the past so we try to look at it as a training exercise we can learn from, really it should never have happened and the valuable time of many of our police and SWAT officers was wasted. This reminds me of a situation in my own life where myself and about 10 other kids were filming scenes for a movie one of them had written. We were dressed in camouflage and had props for the filming which was going to occur in the forest. by the time we got to the area we were going to film the scenes in, a police officer approached and led us out of the forest. There on the street we were surprised to see 4 police vehicles and numerous officers of the law. It turned out that they had received no less than 10 calls about suspicious activity. After the officers saw us teenagers walking out of the forest most of them drove away, and we were simply told we could not film in the forest preserve so not much police time was wasted, but the situation disturbs me nonetheless. 10 people who were driving by and saw teenagers walking into the forest believed that the situation was so dangerous that it actually warranted a call to the police. My point with these stories is that the police are there to help us and they do a terrific job of doing so, but it would be in all of our best interest to not waste their time by calling 911 unless we really understand the situation we are calling about.

Accusation or Condemnation?

Yesterday when the Cold War group presented, I noticed a recurring theme between communism during the cold war and the crucible. This theme was that an accusation of being either a communist or a witch was not just something you could get out of, it was like a punishment in itself. In the case of the cold war, being a communist was not something a person would like to share with everybody, the social perspective was that they were freedom-hating soviet supporters. So when a person was given a subpoena and asked if they had communist affiliations, the mere suggestion that they did was as good as socially exiling the person. This is because the average person realizes that the government would not take the time to summon a person to court for questioning if they did not have significant evidence to believe that the person was a communist. Although this was not always an accurate assumption, people will assume that the person has communist affiliations and treat them very differently because of it. The same is true for the Crucible where an accusation of witchcraft, although it sounds ridiculous today, was probably similar to an accusation of rape or some other violent crime. Also, since most people decided to plead guilty to save their lives, the general population would have every reason to believe that they were truly witches. And who would want to be friends with a witch, even if they had admitted it? I think it is interesting that sometimes the accusation can be just as bad as a conviction in the eyes of society.

The Business of Religion

Mr. Bolos gave us a quote in class a few days ago, "the business of religion is the business of the puritans". Now after some explanation, I understood it meant that the puritans loved their religion and liked to talk about, business being in a social sense. However, when I read it initially, the thought of the puritans making money off of religion came to mind. Although that wasn't really the message of the quote, it got me thinking about the profitability of religious groups and prompted me to research this. I came across an NPR broadcast entitled Inside the Business of Religion on this topic (link). The report says that "there are plenty of companies that make money helping people develop spiritually" and states that the market research firm Packaged Facts estimates that Americans will spend 8.6 billion dollars this year on religious products. Daniel Radosh, a guest on the program, states that he believes it is important that a religious group that intends to take part in commerce, then "they should be representing the highest principles of that religion". He also states that one of his motives for starting his own business was to model these high standards and principles, almost in a way of expressing faith through the way commercial proceedings are held. I found this broadcast very interesting and even a little relevant to The Crucible because of how the people of Salem love to talk about religion and we love to spend money on religion.

The Power of Crowds

In AS class, we have talked about both the wisdom and ignorance of crowds. This is the concept that many people collaborating can problem solve very quickly and be effective in many ways, and at the same time that group of people, with the wrong motives, could influence and control the opinions of every group member. I think that the puritan society in The Crucible is an example of both those concepts fused together. On one hand, the collective beliefs and goals of these people have helped them to form a very successful society, which had previously been uncommon in the "wilderness" of the new world. In addition, however, the combined perpetrating force of the society allows these people to commit the horrible accusations and punishments brought upon the alleged witches of the town. In this way, a society of dedicated, hard working people with essentially nothing but good intentions became a dark chapter in history, stained with the story of the witch trials. This awful history brings me to the question: although not to the severe degree of the witch trials, does a society of like-minded people always bring both strength through unity and ignorance, or could a society exist with only the positives?