My RLiT Take-Away

I have to start by saying of all the reading material that was required for this course this was the one I was least excited about. I gave it a try and become a little addicted to it. Started reading it every chance that I could. I liked the fact that this is a first person account of how another part of the world lives, especially in the Middle East. We seem to receive a lot of information that is speculative on this region and it was refreshing to hear a few stories from the source. The main thing that I took away from reading this novel was the theme of basic freedoms. I look at the differences between those who don't have their freedoms and how they will fight to the death for them and how we, the people of the United States have become complacent with theirs. I think we can all take a lesson from the Iran situation. You know when people say, "You never know what you've got til it's gone?" I think this sum the topic up nicely. All they wanted to do was read books, classics, they wanted to learn. They weren't allowed, so they did it in hiding, in secret. That's how badly they thirsted for knowledge, here; we ban books for much of the same reasons. I encourage you to look at the banned book list for the last 10 years or so. Then look at the reasons why they were banned, I think it may be a shocker to you. This is just an example of how we take what we have for granted and have become increasingly less vigilant in our defense of these rights. It wasn't too terribly long ago that our country went through much bloodshed to acquire these rights that we take for granted today. Millions of people died, lives were destroyed, but what came from all that was wonderful. We are now faced with a challenge; we are in the age of information. Every kid, teenager, and adult has their face glued to a glowing screen of some kind or tweeting about their unimportant lives while there are important changes going on in our world. It makes me sick to see people who are totally uninformed about rights that they will readily take away because they were too busy on their favorite news source, TMZ. I am being syndical, but it comes from a real place and a real fear. Reading this book should be a wake-up call to everyone, take part in your democracy or lose it. It's real simple, I feel we're riding the coattails of those before us; we have to power to do great things, let's not waste it tweeting about what we had for lunch or facebooking. 

Free Speech

So, I'm in charge when a known hate group is invited to speak at my school, what would I do? Do I allow them or deny them the right to speak? I know they are going to speak inflammatory words which are half-truths at best. I know there will be no educational value what so ever, and on that ground I would have denied them. Yes, this would be revoking their freedom of speech or their First Amendment. I have long been a believer that you give your right to speak freely the second you abuse that right to spew hate and fear mongering. At the least, you have to have some semblance of truth to your words. I do not think hate speech should be protected under our first amendment. As I stated prior, there is rarely any educational value to their words and are only used to incite fear of the differences we have. I feel there is no place for this kind of speech, especially in the hot climate this country is in. You have to take into account the history of this country and the wound that racisms and slavery have left. We are attempting to move past that, to truly become a "colorblind" country. I think when we allow this hate speech to be spoken it only deepens the wound which would be moving backwards, and that isn’t the direction we want to go.




There would probably be a lawsuit. It would be ironic because the ACLU would probably be called on to defend a racist, which I find amusing. I think we need to stop being so giving with the right to free speech. There is no place in our society for false and inflammatory speech; there is simply no reason to even acknowledge it. We must get out of this age of disinformation. There are so many outlets for unverified information out there and people do not take the time to decipher it for themselves, they just take what they hear as the truth. This is why we have people walking around talking about all these crazy things regarding President Obama. It just boggles my mind that in a supposed advanced society we still fall for these tricks.



Now, I’m not sure I want free speech restricted thought. There would have to be some pretty stringent guidelines that defined a hate group or hate speech. It would have to be devoid of any and all educational content. It would also have to be verified that it indeed was false information and the only reason for it was to incite fear or violence. These are fairly basic ideas but I think you’ll get the point. We must defend this right that has been fought over for hundreds of years, we should not let it be compromised without fully exploring the ramifications. But, I do think the damage that hate speech does is very sever and is slowing the progress of this country out of the racial quagmire it is in.

Happiness

When I first read this prompt, I quickly began writing. I sat and looked over my work and deleted all of it. I'm going to take a different approach on this essay. I'm going to talk about Abraham Maslow. Maybe you know who he is by his "Hierarchy of Needs". In it he describes what motivates individuals, from base needs to self-actualization. It starts with the most basic of all needs, breathing, sleeping, sex, eating and the sort. Next tier is safety. Employment, self, family, morals all fall under the safety tier. Third tier is love and belonging. Forth tier is one of the important ones for the sake of this essay, esteem. In other words, self-respect. We'll get back to this after the fifth tier, which is self-actualization. This means, morality, creativity, acceptance of facts among others. We're interested in the last two. From this we can surmise that self-respect comes before happiness. Happiness is a relatively new phenomenon. It is also very subjective, as everyone has their own opinion on what makes them happy. Before one can be happy, one must have self-respect, according to Maslow. Happiness on the other hand comes only after one has figured out how to survive, become secure, become loved and feel like they belong, have self-respect, then and only then can they become truly happy.




As I stated before, happiness is an individual act. For the vast majority of you happiness will revolve around some external item. Be it money, material items, or the phrase "I'll be happy once I......Insert random thing that will make you "happy". For the most part, those of you whose happiness revolves around something external, well, it will always elude you. Your happiness will last about as long as it takes your neighbor to get a new car or a pool. Once your friend goes on a more extravagant vacation, the happiness you once had will fade, and the journey to find happiness will start once again. This is why, as some philosophers say, happiness is internal. Someone who is happy will have peace of mind, or have solace in the fact that “God” loves them. These are examples of the vast minorities view on happiness. Most of you will think money will make you happy. It’s easy to think that, we’re brainwashed into thinking that, but do some thinking of your own. Realize that we are insatiable and that if you bank your happiness on external items such as cars and houses, you’re only fooling yourself. So, to summarize, you must have self-respect to become truly "happy". Happiness is a new phenomenon and is an individual feeling that can only be described by that particular individual. An attempt to homogenize the word is doing a disservice to what a wonderful feeling true happiness can be.

Father and Son

In the beginning the relationship I had with my father was in a sense nonexistent. You see, my father had a very high profile position at Warner Brothers in Burbank. This required him to leave home very early in the morning. When he would come home the last thing he wanted to do was talk about the problems the rest of the family was having. This made our relationship more of a business type instead of a classic father son type. You also have to understand my dad is extremely intellectual. He had an answer for everything but followed his answer with a though provoking question. Growing up, this was a very daunting task, knowing that this is the standard that I would be measured by. This made communication very rare, even thought he never gave me reason, I feared communication with him. Maybe it was the prospect of asking a less than academic question or maybe it was not having an answer to a question that he would pose. This was obviously while he was working. My dad retired at age fifty. Our communication instantly changed. When I woke up he was always in the kitchen drinking his cup of coffee and reading the L.A. Times. He was accessible and suddenly interested. He wanted to know how baseball was going for me. He had only seen a handful of games over my twenty year career. Maybe he was guilty for time lost, maybe he was just finally stress free. All I know is through communication our relationship became solid. Granted, things like baseball games or even movies together were rare, we have something more. Through communication he became the professor of life for me. Now I look forward to waking up to discuss recent political events or just ponder life with him. Though we had our communication barriers when I was younger, they are now no where in sight and have no hint of ever returning. This is how I feel communication took a potentially disastrous relationship between a father and a son and turned it into one of the most positive learning environments one could ever hope for. I hope everyone can experience a great relationship with a family member like I have. I encourage everyone to open the lines of communication up, do not be shy or bashful, you will regret it in the end, I know I would have.