Week 2
1400 words by Shay
Three biggest problems
Media influence on public opinion
In this technological age, every bit of information is at our fingertips. If you want to know the weather in Cairo or China it is just one internet search away. The internet connects individuals to the rest of the world but any random person can put information on the internet and claim it to be true. There is also a lot of miss information that is part truth part fiction, this is the worst because on the surface it looks okay but once you get into pivotal details the stories become make believe. The same is true with television. This media is not as bad, the information here is not so much wrong but bias. Certain stories on the news especially encourage stereotypes and water down good deeds. Furthermore, the radio shows mostly do whatever they want. Of course they can’t use profanity but still the influence is negative. These areas of the media all tell our society to believe certain things and act a certain way afraid of the future
Over priced goods
America is the land of dreams, where anything is possible, and you can be whatever you want career-wise. In our capitalist society many people have taken those ideas to heart and sells good s to get a profit in return. Absolutely nothing is wrong with that, the problem occurs when goods of mediocre quality are priced at excellent range. This type of market is unfair to the consumer because they are not getting what they are paying for i.e. the most bangs for their buck. Companies often hide behind a name and logo or nostalgia to pull this scam off. Not all companies who have been in business for an extended period of time pull this stunt, but since most markets are down greedy capitalist decrease quality so that their profit is not affect. We as consumers, with the power of demand to back us must tell the market that this is unacceptable. It is a problem when someone has to keep re-buying goods such as washing machines or pay an arm and a leg a gallon of milk. It is absurd to make Nike tennis $150 when it only cost $4.90 to produce (source: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Boycotts/Nike_DontDoIt_GX.html). One we as consumers stop buying over-priced products only then can we gain full advantages from our open market economy.
Prejudices
Prejudices come in many forms and varying degrees of intensity. It is wrongly justified by the bible and other religious text and used to oppress people or ideas. The most well known is racial but I believe that unpopular sexual orientation and females get the most grief from it. Prejudices are closely related to stereotypes in that a general idea is applied to a whole group of people causing opportunities to be taken from that group. Essentially it the judgment of a person based only on assumptions and then being negative and unfair to that person or group of people because of the rash judgment. This is a problem in the world because many people have been persecuted and even killed because of this ideology. I feel like gays and women are affected the most because they have many more opportunities taking away from them and in this man’s world they are the least understood. On the matter of gay people, I don’t understand why people dislike them so much, or why so many people think it is a choice. Why would a sane person chose to be gay in today’s world with so much intolerance everywhere? People, straight men especially, need to understand that being gay is not a disease or a sexual “preference”; it is an orientation that is thought to be caused in the womb by a chemical imbalance or other factors that contribute to natal development. It is not something that can be cured or fixed as you can’t “fix” the fact that you are born with ten fingers and toes. And condemning people to hell or not allowing them the same rights as “regular” people is just absurd once people began to accept that fact only then can we as a society move forward and include them in our communities. Furthermore, women being victims of prejudices have eluded me forever. I just never understood why one gender is dominate over the other when both take part in continuing the population (women more so than men). I not saying that this is a problem because women are not dominate, I am saying that this is a problem because the whole idea of a dominate gender is crazy. Why can’t both genders have the same opportunities? Yes, I would agree that physical differences are present and does make difficult if not impossible for the other gender to do but that list is short and if they were the only things that women could not do then this prejudge would be a problem. Since the beginning of time women have been discriminated against and you would think that after more than 200,000 years of existences this problem was be extinct but instead it has evolved. Prejudices is the child of ignorance; until that problem is dealt with through education about these different groups, people will still suffer at the hands of there neighbors.
I feel like I can do the most about over-priced goods because since we are I an economic recession it is the problem that is the most pressing in my mind. Not to say that the others are not important, but they can’t even begin to be impacted in one semester at Xavier. Over-priced goods project also affects a wider range of people because everyone has to buy goods, but not everyone has experienced prejudice or feeling that there is a problem with the media. I also choose this project because there are many avenues that may be used to see it out.
There is no such thing as “The Bible” because the word means different things to different religious faiths. Jews use the Hebrew Bible commonly called the Old Testament, Protestants use the Old Testament and the New Testament as their bible, and Catholics have the biggest bible of all with the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Apocrypha as their bible. Even still, some versions translate things differently and the order of the books in each section is different from one religion to the other. Some books are totally excluded from bibles. So, since when you go to a store and each bible you pick up is different from the next by not just style then there can be no such thing as “The Bible.”