Civics

What is civics? Civics is the study of or science of the privileges and obligations of citizens.

There is civic responsibility which are things we should do but are not required to do such as helping people in need, not loitering, and being respectful to others. Civic duties are things people have to do for their country such a voting and obeying laws. Both are things to make life for yourself and others better and more efficient.

Civics overall is the respect that everyone, not matter where they are from or where they live, should know and follow. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people do not respect others while they are talking. This includes interrupting someone who is speaking, ignoring a person who is speaking, or being loud and disruptive while someone is speaking. This means that the civic responsibility that I see to be most important is to listen and respect people while they are speaking. You might disagree with them, or they may be saying the stupidest thing you have ever heard but you should not rude enough to start talking while they are halfway through their thoughts.

So do not interrupt someone else while they speak, it is rude and disrespectful. And it just creates a mess. Wait for people to finish their thoughts before starting your own. No one likes to be cut off halfway through a sentence, so why do you do it to others?

Is Being Poor a Choice?

This is a hard question to tackle and a hard question to take a stand. Defining what poor is much harder than answering the question. Each person who is asked what their definition of poor is will have different answers. There is the blue-collared worker who only saves a few dollars from their pay check, or the single-parent working day and night, sick or not to keep their kids fed. Over all poor goes a long ways in what it is and in the end it all comes to the question- is it a choice?

I believe being poor is a conscious decision, sometimes it does not have to be blatantly obvious; sometimes to be poor you don't have to be living in a shack. Sometimes you can be living in deplorable conditions but you make the effort to make the best of your situation. You don't blame the government or other people for your troubles, you accept the responsibility that has fallen on you. You decide to get up each morning and work your hardest to provide for yourself and for your family, so they can be proud of what they have. Being poor is a choice, you can choose to blame everyone else but yourself for your problems. By blaming others you end up blinding yourself, refusing to seek help because you don't believe others care. If you don't care for yourself what will make others care for you?

This country does a good job in providing for the homeless and the needy. Although it might not be the best model of social welfare available, at least there is concern for the people who need it. We live in a country were the hardships and challenges between people are inevitable, and instead of turning an eye to this blatant inequality there are others trying to help those people who end up in the 'losing' end of the scale. The point being stressed here is that there are choices people can take. There is help that the people who end up being poor can take. Life is full of making decisions and choices and the moment when a person decides to give up and refuse to actively go seek help to better their living conditions, then that is when I say you are poor.

Living does not mean having all of the luxuries in life. Being poor does not mean not being able to afford. Being poor means not taking responsibility for your life and your family. For hoping others will pity you and drag you along. Being poor means being a burden to yourself.  There is a huge amount of respect for single-working parents who break their backs working for their children, those people are not poor. Those people try their hardest to give something better for their kids. There is an enormous amount of respect to people who don't give up when things get rough. I agree, sometimes things are hard and there seems to be no hope but you won't be seen as poor until the day you decide to give up with your life and not only harm your own being but you begin to harm and drag down others with you.

Being poor is hard, to be seen as poor is hard but there are always ways to improve their situations.

Thoughts on X

White: not intended to cause harm, favorable, fortunate.
Black: thoroughly sinister or evil, dirty or soiled.

While reading Chapter 10 Satan, Malcolm X goes to explain how he copied every word in the dictionary and improved his penmanship and extended his vocabulary. After he explained this, he went into detail about what Elijah Mohammad and the Nation of Islam preached about. They said that the "white man is evil." During class a few days ago, we looked up the definitions of white and black , besides pointing out the obvious (pigmentation and colors) we discovered that even in Webster's dictionary there was evil, pureness, harmless and harmful associated with the definition. White is not intended to cause harm, it is favorable and fortunate while black represents dirty, soil, being sinister, being evil. This fact got me thinking that perhaps the reason they argued for the evilness of the white man was to have something to fall on, a way to disprove what was common knowledge. If the black man managed to disprove the dictionary and conventional definitions then maybe what they preached and spread out was true. If people began to question the stated definition people would be less skeptical of this new way of thinking.
After reading the definitions I realized that I wasn't shocked at seeing these connotations to the words, they were things than I had heard around and were even thought to me. People with white skin can be horrendous but just because they are white people are less distrustful of them. A person with a darker skin tone is often looked at with caution and brings up a feeling of distrust. While coming home one day I was looking at how people behaved at the train station. When the station was empty with a few people waiting for their respective trains, women and anyone really, tended to drift towards white men. Standing near them or around them while they moved away from any young black men I saw at the station. I had never put much thought into this before until I remembered the class's conversation. Maybe subconsciously people behave this way because they do associate the colors and coloration of peoples skins with the basic understanding that white is good and black is evil.
Although we are in a more open society there are still those views ingrained in a majority of people. I believe it is wrong, that evil can come in a variety of shapes and colors and it is not something that can be easily defined. I do not agree with the Nation of Islam and their views towards whites. And I do not agree with the white's opinions of colored people. I also do not agree with how people react to skin color but sadly and realistically speaking that won't ever change and it is not only blacks now that are seen as 'evil' and 'dangerous' but middle eastern people and many others who are not 'white' or Caucasian.

King is still King?

Everyone knows who Dr. Martin Luther King is, and if you do not shame on you! It must mean you did not pay attention in any of your US History classes. I feel like the only reason people know of Dr. King is because of their history classes. People just know that he did something for civil rights but when I ask them more about it they give me a blank look. "Why should we care? It already happened...," is the usual response I get. Although, I will admit I know the basics of Dr. King's accomplishments and life I am far more aware of his importance to our current day life. Now, no one questions the fact that there are blacks, whites, browns, yellows, whatever color you decide to add in there, interacting with each other in a regular basis. People don't realize that this a few decades ago would have been unimaginable.
Maybe socially King is not the King. His accomplishments will always make him a King, but if people do not take the effort to keep his name and image alive he will fade like many, many, many, historical figures have. I believe that what Dr. King was fighting for has not been fully accomplished and because his fight still lives on to this day, maybe in different forms but in the end it is the same basic problem. Because of this, Dr. King should still be King. People need to use him, and many of the other civil rights figures, to keep on fighting and to draw support and knowledge from. People can still take so much from what he achieved, from his speeches and images and ideas.
I fear for King, I fear that he will soon just become a historical figure that we need to learn. I am afraid that he will become a vacant name although what he fought for has taken a different form, perhaps now different people are being attacked. To me King will not stop being King until another King comes in to further out his story/legacy.

Die Antwoord

Yo-Landi Vi$$er and Ninja

Most people are surprised when they catch a glimpse of the music that is found on my laptop, phone, and iPod. Two summers ago, during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, I first heard of this South African rap-rave group, Die Antwoord "The Answer". From the first song I heard I realized that every video, every track, every appearance should be labeled with a warning label.
This South African group can be simply described as "Brilliant Weirdness", people have to be able to stomach the graphic images and very blunt and obscene language. Yet, Die Antwoord is not simply a very weird and strange rap group, it is a rap-rave group that borrows tales and values from the South African Zef culture, they borrow the trashy and disregarded cultural elements. They take the 'ugly' of a culture and turn it into a very interesting form of music. Die Antwoord breaks many Afrikaans stereotypes, borrowing from the recently oppressed black community. What captivates me most from their music is not the surreal imagery they use in their videos but how they manage to mix three languages into their music; Afrikaans, Xhosa, and English. I also love how they manage to bring up a cultural item into all of their songs, from Evil Boy which deals with tribal rituals. Die Antwoord is a refreshing thing, out of the ordinary but very interesting. Their very pronounced South African accent adds more to their style, and their hip-hop fusion with rave is very new and thrilling.
But like I said earlier on, listen to them with caution. You have to be very open minded to be able to really listen to them.

Die Antwoord- Baby's on Fire http://youtu.be/tpNvk4iE0V4
Die Antwoord- I fink U freeky http://youtu.be/QGIbDQpVqX4
Die Antwoord- Faty Boom Boom http://youtu.be/bWEJHg4Hgqc
Die Antwoord- Fok Julle naaiers http://youtu.be/ektsOP8yOQM

Solititude

Reflecting on solitude led me to realize that almost everyone in my family are solitary people. I do not like being around a lot of people, I do not like having to socialize when I don't feel like it. Ever since I was a young girl, I never liked hanging out in crowds. While there are people who yearn for the company of others, I prefer being by myself. If society didn't frown down upon solitude as much as it does, I would probably not care for being social. There is always this constant pressure that makes me look for people, to be their friend and to have them keep me company. I do not like this pressure, but at the same time I do not like others giving me pitiful looks because I am sitting alone or walking alone. Physically I am never alone but emotionally and mentally I am, and there is nothing wrong with that. I might have someone to keep me physical company but there is no one that understands how I think and how I feel. I like having life this way, it creates a sense of privacy and feeling of self. Being alone gives me the opportunity to find things I am happy for, I do not have to pretend to like something or to act one way. Yes, perhaps I need to find other friends who I have more in common but it is hard to do that, to establish friendships on common things because if people are like me, I will never know when they are truly are being sincere or they too are changing just so they can have someone and not be alone. Being alone is not bad, and I will never understand why society sees is as a bad stigma.

I Know This Means Something

Everyone always has those days where we have a sudden epiphany. You might be driving down the street, or sitting out somewhere, where there is no one that keeps distracting you. You are paying attention to the road or to nothing, just alone with your thoughts. When you reach that moment of thinking where you go over what you do and why you do it you often get that feeling of either satisfaction, indifference, or panic. Some people will be happy to realize that everything they do is for something and has a meaning. Those people might make themselves happy or others happy. At the end they are satisfied with what they do and with the meaning that their life and actions have. Then, there are the indifferent people. They don't mind their life like it is. Yeah, sometimes it must suck but they deal with it. They might not find meaning in all of their actions  but they know that there are some in between that do. To them, they are not sure if there is meaning in something but they won't take the extra step to figure it out. Let it come to them if there is, if not then oh well. Lastly, we have our panickers. The people who left alone in their thoughts will panic because they realize that what they are doing has no direction. Sometimes they over analyze things to the point where they have no distinction on what is enjoyable and what is not. They do not know if something means something, if they do not see it right infront of them then they won't believe it. They do not know what to do with themselves and if you do not know what to do with yourself, how can you know things have meaning or not? If you have not found your individual meaning?
I am probably way off, or wrong in most of this. But I do not care, or mind, because it is something I think of often. Something that somehow makes sense to me. I often have those days where I am alone with my thoughts and I just think. Every time this happens I go over events that have happened to me and I think to myself, "This happened for a reason. The reason might not be explained right now, but maybe it will be later on. But this has a reason." If you believe something happens for a reason then you must know it means something. Everyone has to know something means something in their life, some come to the realization sooner than others but it happens. You just have to wait.