Social Media

Since the rise of social media, it seems as though all of my friends are suddenly experts on a lot of things.  Something that is very popular for them to know all about it politics and their opinion is always the correct thing that everyone should believe.  Unfortunately for me, I have a wide range of friends on my Facebook feed, which means a wide spectrum of opinions that they post about more than they should.  I have friends, mostly people that know my parents and added me as well, that are old timey hippies and on the other end of it I see posts from the feed of down south redneck people.  Most of their posts drive me insane.

To solve this, I don't delete them or block them or comment on their posts telling them I'm tired of seeing what they say.  I simply scroll onto the next story, usually something funny from Buzzfeed or a football story from ESPN.  Just like that, I have avoided reading all about their rants.  I noticed that this was especially an issue during the aftermath of the Ferguson decision.  Some of my news feed was outraged over the decision, and they cried out that the grand jury made a mistake and that the cop should have faced a sentence.  Another part of my news feed consisted of people defending the cop, claiming that he did nothing wrong and the grand jury was right.  All the posts about it really started to annoy me, but I resorted to that little trick of scrolling on.

That is an issue with trying to accomplish things via social media.  It's so easy to post things and call out for action, and many people do it, and some are successful at it.  But if you're like me, I just scroll on and forget about it.  I can imagine that a lot of people would rather scroll onto the Buzzfeed post about the 21 cutest animal pictures of 2014 than read about something that needs action.  Because of that, I feel like a large audience is missed and it makes social media fairly ineffective in rallying people.

He's a Person, and Everyone Deserves to be Treated Nice

Scrolling through images online, I came across an image that had to do with Michael Brown.  A woman that taught young children, kindergartners or first graders, showed the kids Michael Brown's graduation photo of him in his cap and gown.  She then asked the kids how they would react to seeing this man on the street.  The kids did not recognize Michael as the young man that had been killed by a police officer, they just saw a man in a graduation cap.  The kids said they would congratulate him, or shake his hand, or share their snacks with him.  Their teacher asked them why they chose to react in such a kind way.  The kids responded along the lines of "He's a person and everyone should be nice to other people."

The children didn't seem to mind that he was a black man.  All they saw was a young man, during one of the proudest moments in his life.  They saw a man about to walk for his high school graduation, and the kids wanted to give him kind words.  Everyone else in the nation, however, do not feel the same way about Michael Brown.  An alarming number of people believe that Michael got what he had coming to him, and Darren Wilson was completely in the right to shoot him dead.

After reading "When All the Angels are White" and looking into the Michael Brown case a little bit, I saw that black people and white people are still held to very different standards, even in the 21st century.  It is very sad to me that we still live in a world where atrocities like this can be acceptable by the mainstream culture.  I wish to see our culture be reshaped into something that gives fair and equal treatment to everyone, and we need to start by holding people like Darren Wilson accountable for his actions.

Taking a Look at Harassment

As many of you have probably seen, there has recently been a video produced showing a woman walking around New York City for ten hours.  The woman receives countless jeers and comments from people she walks by.  This has drawn many different reactions, most of them being that women should not be subjected to this kind of behavior when they simply walk around the streets. (Which they should not, but that is not the focus of this post.)

This boy, Alex, has recently become Twitter famous after a girl snapped a picture of him at work at Target.  The tag #alexfromtarget quickly blew up all over social media.  This boy has become famous enough to attract the attention of TV star Ellen.  

This has created some outrage online about the inequalities between men and women when it comes to harassment.

Here is just one example I found:

The patriarchal society we live in today usually favors men over women.  So there are more men in high power positions, men earn more money than women do in the same position, and things like that.  But sometimes the roles are flip flopped and women have the advantage.  Times when the role is switched is usually seen in divorce cases when women are almost always awarded custody of the child or children, and in this case where both parties were subjected to harassment but only the harassment of the woman was seen as problematic.  There has not been a resounding outcry of protest in taking the creep shot of the boy that works at target, where there have been hundreds of thousands of reactions saying that women should not be subjected to harassment like that.

It just shows that our culture is rooted in the idea that men are strong and therefor are not affected by things like harassment, when they face it just like women do.

Unrealistic Representation

With the recent happenings with Honey Boo Boo and her family, I feel like it would be good to talk about how people in poverty are viewed on television, especially reality television.  The show I would like to talk about is the show on MTV called Teen Mom.  There are two different versions, Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2.  They are all people that were on the MTV show 16 and Pregnant.  TM and TM2 follows the lives of some of the characters as they figure out how to raise a baby and continue moving their lives forward.

The people chosen to take part in 16 and Pregnant are more often than not lower class people from rural/less populated areas.  I have noticed that quite a lot of them are from the southern part of the states.  The moms are usually kids that enjoy going out and partying and are generally not the most responsible people.  Then they end up with an accidental pregnancy and the teenage father freaks out.  Now all of a sudden they have to pay for hospital visits, baby essentials, and sometimes even a place on their own since some of the parents end up kicking the teens out.  

Money is almost always seen as an issue in 16 and Pregnant, but by the time the moms end up on TM or TM2, they are living comfortably.  One instance stands out to me with Kailyn from TM2.  When she was on 16 and Pregnant, she was living with her boyfriend at the time in his home.  His family took care of her and she basically had nothing.  In TM2, Kailyn is able to buy her own home, pay for a wedding, drive a $50k suburban, and live really comfortably.  It gives a false hope to people that live in the lower class that they can so easily turn things around like that.  

Not So Poor Penny

For most people in the US, money is something to worry about.  However, that is not how the average person is portrayed in modern sitcoms.  Even the "poor" characters still have it pretty good.  A good example of this is "The Big Bang Theory."

In TBBT, there are five main characters.  Four of them work at a university doing research.  They all make very decent money.  Then there is the fifth character, Penny.  Penny is a girl that packed everything and moved out to LA to be an actress.  Her acting career has yet to take off, so in the mean time she is working as a waitress at The Cheesecake Factory.  The show does not hide the fact that Penny does not have a lot of money, in fact there are several episodes where her income is involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liu5PWoNXbw

Here is a clip where Penny buys a pair of shoes.  She says that they cost more than her rent and that she can't afford them, but she bought them anyway.  So she is clearly the poorest of the characters.

Despite this, she still lives in a really nice apartment in the same building with two of the characters that earn a salary of someone that does research at a university.  Granted her apartment is smaller than theirs, but it is still very nice for someone that lives off tips.

Current media has a trend of portraying "poor" characters as not so poor and this is a great example.

Working Class Mom

Watching television, I have come to notice that something the media uses to depict a working class is a household with a single mother.  An example of this is a show called "One Day at a Time."

Most of my life I grew up underneath the care of a single mother household.  My mom was the sole caretaker for my sister and I until I was about 12 or 13.  I do not find that being brought up in a single mother household is any disadvantage, or anything to be negatively stigmatized.  My mom worked while my sister and I were in school, and she was able to buy and pay off a house for us all on her own.

You'd think that my sister and I suffered from a lack of time with our mom, but that was not the case at all.  She spend every evening and weekend with us and helped us with our school projects and we ate dinner together every night and she was there at all of our school programs.

I feel that it is very unfair to look at single mother households negatively.  I know from first hand experience that it is not a bad thing to just have a mom, and that a family can flourish under those circumstances.

Uninformed Citizen

As I have come to learn, I am a very uninformed citizen.  I am not a consumer of news.  I don't read the newspaper, either local or national.  The only time I have the news channel on is when there is a football game on to watch.  The only "news" I consume is from my social media feeds.  The two main social media sites that I get news from are Facebook and Tumblr.  A lot of my friends on Facebook are very politically opinionated, and most of what they post is incredibly biased.  The same thing is true for the "news" I get from Tumblr.  The people on Tumblr are also very biased, so I can't trust everything I read on there.

I was shown a list of current events and was asked to rank them in order of what I thought was most important at this point in time.  My list went police brutality, because of the recent happenings in Ferguson; climate change, because I saw a thing about a huge march that went on in New York City; gay marriage; terrorism; abortion rights; poverty; health care;  and then unemployment.

After looking at various websites, I found out just how little I know about current events.  The actual list of important things that were happening was terrorism, which showed  up as the headline of every online news source I saw; ebola, Hillary Clinton, and then climate change.  I didn't even know that Hillary Clinton was in the news recently.  I had heard of some cases of people dying in Africa from ebola and that the CDC had allowed some doctors to re-enter the states that tested positive for ebola.  All of which may not be true, it's just what I seem to remember about it.  I have heard about ISIS in the current events, but all that I had heard was that they had captured and executed some reporters.  They might not have even been reporters, it's also just what I seem to remember.  I had no idea that the US was intervening over there.

This was an interesting exercise for me to do.  I'm surprised at how little I know about, even though I don't make it a habit of following the news.

Accidental Racism

Growing up in Southern Colorado has done some interesting things to the way I think.  I went to school with quite a few Mexican people, and so my mind started to assume that everyone that wasn't white was Mexican.
When I came up to CSU, I had to quickly rework the way I thought.  This became apparent to me when I was making friends in the dorm building.  There was a boy that was in our group of friends.  He had dark skin and over time I found out that he spoke fluent Spanish. My mind automatically categorized him has Mexican.  After talking to him it was brought to my attention that he is actually half white, half black.
I had grown up with the only ethnic groups being white and Mexican that I had an automatic activation that made me assume that everyone with darker skin than mine was Mexican.  Automatic activation is something we are conditioned to think.  A great example of automatic activation comes from Tim Wise's documentary "White Like Me."  Tim Wise grew up going to a black school and is an equal rights activist.  Despite having a diverse and open minded background, Wise explains in his film that he boarded a plane one day and noticed that the two pilots were black.  His first thought was, "Are they qualified to do this?"  From being exposed to the media and thoughts of the dominant group all his life, Wise's first thought was that the pilots were not capable of flying a plane just because of their race.  Wise said that immediately after his first thought, his rational brain kicked in and remembered that in order to be a pilot one has to go through extensive training, and they would not have a job if they were unqualified for the position.

My Experience With "Othering"

With the 13th anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks passing last week, I'd like the focus of this blog post to be around the concept called "othering."  This term was somethinWg that new to me until recently, even though I have been surrounded by the effects of it almost all of my life.  The general act of othering is the act of comparing ourselves, usually on a cultural scale, to another group in order to distance ourselves from that other group.  It alienates another group of people in order to make our culture normal and right.  

My experience with othering dealt with the culture of the Middle East.  All my life I remember seeing videos and clips of radical groups from the Middle East on the news or in movies, fueled by the United State's conflict with them.  I became accustomed to this view of the Middle East, and although I did not realize it until recently, this viewpoint also instilled a subconscious level of fear of the Middle East.

I grew up in a small town with hardly any diversity, I had a huge culture shock when I moved away for college and found myself in the midst of many different cultures.  I was not used to living in such a diverse place, and it took me a little bit of time to move past my previous notions about certain cultures.

From the news and what I had gathered in my (little) knowledge of the Middle East, I knew them to be a violent culture.  I also knew them to be a culture that did not appreciate or respect women.  These thoughts were never something that was explicitly taught to me, but rather they were my own opinions that I had formed based on the knowledge I had.  I have always thought of myself as an open minded person, so the narrow view I had of Middle Eastern people was not something I was proud of.  

  With these prior opinions in mind, I was hesitant to reach out and make friends with the Middle Eastern students.  It took a visit from some old friends in high school to get me to look beyond what I thought I knew and find out first hand how they were.  My friends are avid hookah smokers, so we ended up at a local hookah place.  There happened to be quite a few Middle Eastern men there as well, and our groups ended up hanging out together and talking.  Much to my surprise, the Middle Eastern men were so kind to me.  They even stuck up for me when my friends playfully picked on me.   They also told my friends not to curse in front of my because it was disrespectful.  They joked with me and laughed with me and had conversations with me and I was so very wrong about any previous thought I had about people from the Middle East.  

Going back to the term othering, I am so disappointed to think about how many other people had the same thoughts that I did based on how the Middle Eastern people are portrayed here in the US.  It saddens me to think that an entire group of people is defined solely on the US's conflict with them.

Re-Watching Childhood Cartoons

Have you recently re-watched some cartoons or movies from your childhood?  Did you pick up on jokes and innuendos for the first time, even though you’ve seen the feature a hundred times?  Producers of children’s content throw these kind of things in all the time.

A great example of this is the show that aired on Cartoon Network called “Johnny Bravo.”  When I watched it as a child, I saw Johnny Bravo as a guy that just wanted a girlfriend.  He would ask out girl after girl and every time they would turn him down.  I liked the character Johnny Bravo as a kid because I saw him as a guy that never gave up, no matter how many people told him no.  The character also is shown to have a good relationship with his mom, which was a nice thing to see in a cartoon.  It taught me that I should be nice to my mom and that it wasn’t hard to have a good relationship with a parent. 

Another thing that Johnny Bravo taught me is that anyone can be friends, no matter what they look like.  In the show, Johnny Bravo is a big macho handsome blond man and his best friend is a dorky skinny little guy with glasses.  It showed me to look beyond the surface appearance of people and show interest in their character.

It has been at least ten years since I have watched the show and a lot has changed with the way I look at things.  I have a broader understanding of the world, and I am able to mindfully absorb media. 

The main thing that shocked me with “Johnny Bravo” was the way that Johnny was portrayed. In my adolescent mind, he was funny and desirable.  Watching the show now made me view him in a completely different light.  Johnny Bravo’s character is dumb.  Not lame dumb, like actually stupid.  This show made men out to be big muscly blond idiots that can’t think on their own.  Johnny Bravo is also very superficial; there was an entire episode where he needed more hair gel and couldn’t function without it. 

Another aspect of the show that I didn’t pick up on when I was little was how the women were portrayed.  All the women that were drawn for the show had incredibly small waists and big butts and big chests and big bouncy hair.  In one episode I recently watched, Johnny Bravo gets abducted by aliens and even the aliens looked that way, they were just colored green. 

Also something that was interesting to me was the fact that Johnny Bravo would not take no for an answer from the women he pursued.  The only way he stopped asking them out was when they beat him up in the classic cartoon fashion.  It was intriguing to see the makers of this cartoon saying that it’s okay to go after a woman, even after she says no.  In reality, a woman should not have to physically beat off someone that she is not interested in.

Despite catching things like in “Johnny Bravo,” I really enjoy having a blast from the past and watching things from my childhood.  It’s amazing what new things I pick up on.