Cycle of Racism

As we talked in class today about our final essay, which was about the existence of a cycle in American history. I read an article today that proved to me that there indeed is a cycle existing in American history today, and it is not a positive one. An African American man working at a warehouse in Tennessee, recently filed a complaint for his supervisor's discriminatory behavior against him. The worker has been discriminated for months, and he finally decided to record one of the conversations he had with his supervisor. In the recording, a shocking conversation could be heard that reminds the listeners of something from the Jim Crow days. The worker asks the supervisor if he could use the microwave, and the supervisor responds with a "hell no!". When asked why, he answered it was because the worker was not white. At a different time when the worker wanted to use the water fountain, the supervisor responded with the same reaction. A voice can be heard on the recording saying, "I need to put a sign here that says, 'white people only'". Federal Compress, which is the company that hired the supervisor, said it has a zero tolerance policy towards discrimination and the worker's supervisor was immediately fired.
After reading this article, it became clear to me that racism still exists in America today, and it is just lurking around in many places in society.  I believe racism taking in the form of violence has mostly disappeared from modern society but verbal racism still exists. I wrote a similar blog post the other day about a police commissioner making a racist comment about president Obama. In both cases, verbal racism took place and outsiders had to report to authority to have the racism stopped, in this case the victim himself. Verbal racism has been existing in America since the age of slavery, where it all started from addressing African Americans as the n-word. In our society now, the n-word and other derogatory words are used pretty normally in media, and in between people. I believe the cycle of verbal racism will continue on forever no matter what. Unlike physical violence, speaking is a very simple and easy task. Racist people who cannot express their discriminatory thoughts by violence are now doing it verbally and no one can control what they say except for themselves. If these racist people don't decide to completely eliminate their racist thoughts, verbal racism will never end.

Unchanging Cycle in America

As many cycles exist in American history, I believe one of the most distinct cycle is the one surrounding gun violence.
As you can see in this article, America owns the most guns with the statistic of 88 guns owned per 100 people. America is also responsible for the most gun related deaths out of any other country. On the other hand, japan has 0.6 guns owned per 100 people which makes it the country with the least owned guns and the fewest gun related homicides. I read both Japanese and American news online and the number of times I see gun related news is very significant. When I was CNN.com a few minutes ago I read an article about an another school shooting in Seattle Pacific University. As Iwas scrolling   down to read more, I looked at the side of the webpage where there are the related news articles. As I read these articles I realized how ridiculous so many of their titles sounded. The first news article was about a school in Washington buying bulletproof whiteboards. and the article right below it was about a survey in this one school where teachers answered they don't want to carry guns so they want armed guards in their school. Then about six articles continued after that all related to different school shootings. As I have read some of these articles, I realized a single trait throughout all of them. All of these articles contained comments from parents, or the people related to the killed victims. The comments off course, started off with them expressing their deep sadness for losing the people close to them. The interesting thing is that all of these comments then addressed a similar topic, which was about the government should do something with gun control.
Every time there is a gun related incident, the victims family and people who are close to them always express their feelings that the government should do something with gun control. The government always replies with a vacant answer, saying that they are working on it. I believe this is the unending cycle that is existing in America right now, gun related incidents happening and the victims telling the government to take action and the government replying to them with an empty answer.

Blurred Boundaries

I recently read a shocking article online that showed how a jumble of fantasy and reality can be very frightening. A 12-year old girl was found stabbed 19 times by her two friends in a forest. Her two friends, who were both also 12-years old, told the police that they were planning to kill her friend so that they can "impress a ghoulish character called slender man"(CNN). They explained that to impress the Slenderman, they had to kill a friend of theirs. The Slenderman is an urban legend born from an internet meme that has been going around for some time now. He is supposedly a tall man with no face who abducts children. I believe it is actually getting pretty famous and popular among the American culture, as many images of him can be seen online (like the one above) and even many virtual games about Slenderman are being created.

The girl's injuries were not life-threating but it is unbelievably freighting to hear that very young kids could potentially grow the thought of killing their friends based on an urban legend born from an internet meme. One of the two girls was known by her family that she has been showing a great deal of interest in the fictional character, Slenderman for a long time. According to her brother,  she was a "normal happy 12-year old with a couple of weird interests". She was a frequent visitor of this website that posts fictional horror stories, many of which are written to make them seem like true stories. I believe this could be seen as a common problem in the world right now where any kind of information could be accessed instantly by anyone. This girl probably didn't start to grow violent thoughts until she got exposed to all of the horror-related information online. The over exposure to the information on the internet made this girl lose sense of what is real and what is not. It is very dangerous how boundaries for reality and imagination has become very blurred in society nowadays. So many information, both true and false, are so easily accessible that it could make people become numb in determining what is reality and what is imaginary. Especially to young kids, like these 12-year old girls, it will be much harder for them to fully differentiate the information that they get exposed to. This makes me realize the fact that convenience always comes with a down side and it is the younger generation that gets affected the most.