....everyone is a little bit racist...

First, I want to start by sharing something I have been doing for a while. When ever surveys or tests and all that jazz show up in my life, if the question of race comes up, I don’t answer. What does it matter? Really?

So I remember back my freshman year, my Reading enrichment teacher was reading off some stats that the school had up with the different grades of races, along with the percentages in the population. I said why do we do this? Why does it matter if someone else is different. So what if one race is smarter then the other, doesn’t it just ask for more judgment in the world? She didn’t know what to say so she just said the school has to do it legally. I don’t even know if its true, but it seems like not many people think it through. With these polls, we only create more stereotype and reason to judge others.

I have this friend who is classified as Asian. She was in regular courses and told me many students wondered why she wasn’t in an AP course. They thought all Asians are smart. It hurt her feelings and made it more of a hassle to get to class because people judged her because she didn’t “fit” her race.

No matter what, internally, we all have judgments about race. We all learn to let it pass because in these times, we all need to learn to love and accept one another and celebrate our differences.

so tonight ii was with a group who might be well assosiated with the upper middle class. one person was wealthy enough to have a driver take her here. when i pulled up to the house, i saw a man sitting in a car outside my house. i was wondering why is he sitting there and who is he? i walked in and find out hes a driver. and i tell them it makes me sad that hes sitting there while his boss is having a blast with people and food. i asked why just leave him there and the response was well hes getting paid good money. to them, they can do anything to anyone as long as they give um the money. i think to myself how much the working class gets controlled and manipulated to do what the upper class say. all this because of the good old american dollar. same with the idea of paying more for taxes for more money. many people feel cheated becase there good earned dollar is going to people who cant pay for the hospital. i think to myself, arent we all equal? we were put on this earth to live in harmony with each other but i guess because we are all different species of humans we cant get along and work together side by side without being better then everyone else. it kills me that most people will never learn to just live and help everyone else out whether they earned what they have or not. isnt that the good thing to do? and dont we all strive to be better people anyway? that should be our goal; work together side by side and accept everyone for what they can offer to the world because every time we forget about that working class person, we miss out on a whole world of ideas and concepts because they dont have money. i mean think back to world war 2. think of the 6 million who died. think about all the science and technology and ideas are lost with those lives because there lives got taken away because people thought they were better then everyone. so lets work together and make this place better for everyone.

Stay Classy Stevenson

Now I know I might just be stating the obvious but Stevenson kids don’t realize that stuff they get on a daily basis only apply to their own class. Many kids expect to get a car and a license at 16. When I go hang out with my friend from Chicago, her nor her friends have a car. They don’t have a use for one. When they saw me pull up in my dads car, it was totally weird for them to see. Many of the students don’t realize that chance comes from being middle to upper middle. Same with the idea of college, many of us just expect to go to a big school because that’s what Stevenson tells us we should do. I started asking around my friend from San Jose and he said many of his friends don’t go to school and no one from his family ever graduated. That is just something that happens in his area. When I told him how Stevenson runs there school, it sounds totally foreign to him. At his school, they don’t even really care much about the SAT when here at Stevenson, its everything! The reason why we do better is because many of us can afford those tutors to help us when we need it. Its all a gift that we have what we have, but, its so easy to forget that this goes hand in hand with the class we were raised in.

Slipin Through the Cracks

Slipping through the cracks:
Hearing the story of the guy who got life in jail for being a middle man upset me. It stinks about his life being totally gone because of weed. But I started to think, this kind of stuff happens every day with different cases and it’s the ones we hear on TV. The media glamorizes these stories like it’s a new TV drama. Like Michael Jackson, for all we know he could have been innocent but he past through the loop hole some couldn’t get through. The reason the law was made was to punish people and it can’t be always perfectly fair. Someone with get kind of screwed and someone will be really screwed. That guy got really screwed. But in order for some of us to get fair trials I feel that some have to take a bigger hit. And another thing, our legal system is always changing. One day it will be weed gets you life, another say it will be parking over the line at Stevenson. There will ALWAYS be someone screwed.
(… another time people get screwed is social class. Not everyone can be rich so the poor people have to take the hit for it now.)

saints and roughnecks.

Hollywood

Lets see who is a saint! So I would say Martha Stewart because up to the point she was caught, she probably thought she could get away with all the trading. And then…. The good girl of TV with an already huge salary, wants more! Now she reminds me of the classic case of the upper class getting away with everything. Yes, that’s exactly what we read in class, but, I think now people know this and are conscious of it. They know they can get away with there actions.

Then we have my girl Lindsey Lohan. She has got to be the rough neck. She always gets in trouble for crashing cars and drugs. She is always in the eyes of the cops because they know she is capable of all this. And she cant get away.

Both have media on them but Martha gives a vide out to people that she is only a sweet little old lady who runs a crafty show. And Lindsey gives the impression that she doesn’t care what all those people think.

Pets and Neglect

so they are showing stuff about puppy mills on tv and how neglect effect them and they showed this one dog walking in circles till he passed out and he had one popped out eye. reminded me of that one girl we talked about :[
-SHaily

what you got under your shirt will make them pay for the things that they did

a dark song that i cant help but love
Teenagers By My Chemical Romance

They're gonna clean up your looks
With all the lies in the books
To make a citizen out of you
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on you, son
So they can watch all the things you do
Because the drugs never work
They're gonna give you a smirk
'Cause they got methods of keeping you clean
They're gonna rip up your heads,Your aspirations to shreds
Another cog in the murder machine

They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

The boys and girls in the clique
The awful names that they stick
You're never gonna fit in much, kid
But if you're troubled and hurt
What you got under your shirt
Will make them pay for the things that they did

This song tells us the reasons behind shooting. Kids get called names all the time and they put down your entire life. And what they got under there shirts (guns) will make them pay. It mentions the cliques which are always the people who are one sided and don’t see anything else in this world but themselves. And Stick: when you hear a name so many times, people tend to repeat it. I honestly don’t think the phrase that’s so gay is just something that everyone does. Someone started saying it and then someone else said it and then it just became a part of peoples vocabulary. Its completely pathetic. And no the drugs never work. You cant take a pill to make people not make fun of you. Just like that’s so gay happened, names you call certain people stick. Everyone joins in to pick on a kid, they will continue because they know its not them. I could go on and on about the message in this song. But you can read it yourself and think about how you feel. And this songs video was actually supposed to come out right around the time of the Virginia Tech shooting but was delayed because they re-edited it to make it more suitable for the viewers.

As much as it sounds bad to say, I justify these shooters for there rage and anger. No I do not think they should be killing people, but, they have every right to be angry. It seems that the people in our class don’t see it that way. After hearing a comment in class that was clearly based on there own bubble, made me realize how little some people see. Just saving a few phrases directly or indirectly can make this song into a reality. These kids who get shot specifically by the shooters needed to learn a lesson but never did and it cost them there lives. No they shouldn’t die, of course not, but no one ever has sympathy with the shooter. I have sympathy with them are human beings not as killers. People lived there lives every day and new these people were being treated badly by peers yet they either joined in or did nothing to stop it. Why haven’t people learned to love one another and not make fun of each other. that’s the only way we can prevent this stuff. We should try to embrace these people and not hurt them. I don’t understand why this keeps happening every where. People need to quit. These boys needed someone by there side and clearly no one was there. It seems like people were asking for a backlash. Sorry but that’s reality. We are the reason for these boys rage. We need to be the cure to the problem because its all in our hands.

*Just wanted to say something here I said in class. Its white boys because even though we don’t have a true definition for the word normal, a white middle class male has got to be close. They aren’t all too special and there problems seem tiny compared to females and minorities.