Reflection #9 My experience in blogging

My experience in blogging this semester was very good since it was something I had never done before and that is very useful. I learned many things by looking for information on the internet about the topics I was going t write about for each post. It was very useful to me because I practiced writing and this made me lose the fear of writing and improve my writing skills. But with blogging I learned much more than just grammar and writing skills; most of the blog entries where reflections about essays that where read and discussed in class. With these essays I learned many things about social political and economic problems all over the world and reflecting about them made us many times come out with possible solutions to these problems.At the beginning I thought that blogging would be hard or just more work but it’s actually a way of expressing yourself. Even though you have the pressure of thinking that someone is going to read what you wrote and you think about what would they think, but then you get used to it and just write whatever comes into your mind that you want to express. Blogging is also way to interact and know more about your classmates since you can visit their blogg read their opinions and leave comments. This makes you know more about the topics and views many different points of view of the same situations.

Reflection #8 The exaggeration of terrorism

Every day we watch the news on the TV just to keep track of all the things that have been happening. If we start to analyze all the news most of them are bad things that are happening around the world. Every time the news knows about some incident that is not very likely to happen they want to make every one to know about it and give it a lot of importance. And forget about her events that are more probable to happen since no one cares about them. Eventually people start to think that these events are more likely to happen than then really are.

Also government has all this organizations to protect the population from being attacked by bombs, terrorism, and anthrax attacks when the probability for any of these things happens are very low. There’s a chance for all this things to happen but the media presents to the public in a way that makes us think different, they exaggerate the events for their own good, to make it more interesting to us. This makes people more scared to terrorism or other attacks like this than they should be and less scared of other threats that are more probable to happen to them like a car accident, assault or robbery.

Simple crime and accidents can happen everywhere anytime but terrorism is more likely to happen in some specific places, mostly very important places, government buildings or attacking powerful people; but still people have created a huge fear to all this kinds of attacks. The reason is because people are mostly afraid of incidents that they don’t feel they control their fate. Like when you are on a plane, many people are scared of being on an airplane because they aren’t driving it, they don’t feel like they have control and they start to freak out. People are more scared of be on a plane than they are scared of driving a car, what they don’t know is that there are more probabilities of being killed in a car than in an airplane crash.

Reflection #7 Blood Diamonds

Sometimes people buy many articles just for fun; most people don’t even think or reflect about who made it or where did it come from. For example, have you eve thought about where did all those beautiful expensive diamonds you buy in the jewelry where mined?

This diamonds come from a very remote place in Africa called Sierra Lone. This place is the battle field for a war. An organization called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) takes people as slaves and makes them mine diamonds for trading them to other countries for arms or money to sustain the needs of this war. If this people working in this mines are caught or are suspected of theft are most likely killed or dismembered but sometimes they even did it just for fun. This organization constantly committed these crimes to maintain a certain fear in the community so none of them will stand against them so they will have complete domination of the whole diamond field. These people injured in battle by the RUF even if the wound is not lethal it many times gets infect and may get many diseases because of the lack of medical treatment in Sierra Lone, so this often lead to the death of the person.

This situation began in the early 90’s and it’s still tormenting these people and they can’t do anything about. There have been non-political organizations in the United States where they try to help but it was very little what they where able to do because they need political power if they want to do anything about the problems occurring in Africa. They got to put a law in place that made the exportation of diamonds harder for the RUF since every single diamond need to have a document that indicated the precedence of it and where it was found; but this did very little help to it since this type of document was easily faked by the traders.

So the next time you think about buying diamonds think about this situation, you may be founding this war where thousands of people are being killed.

Reflection #6 Life on a Global Assembly Line

United States, known as the land of the free or the land of the American dream it’s a place where everything you want you can get it at the lowest prices. You can have the best life you could get. But everything has a catch.

If you have a closer look almost everything is made in other countries like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, The Dominican Republic, Mexico, The Philippines, etc. These are third world countries. Countries where there are only two social classes: the rich, and the poor. While rich people just lay back and enjoy life the poor people has to find ways to generate money for surviving and feeding a family; since there are very few jobs in places like this United States established factories for “helping” this people.

The truth is that they don’t do it for the good of these people; instead it’s for their own good. It’s much cheaper for them to pay this people since they do the work no matter how they are paid than pay for the same work in the United States.

In this kind of factories work mostly women, who are chosen not for their intelligence but for their ability to work fast and don’t talk. Women are practically forced to work for extended periods of time on inhuman conditions. But they have no rights to do anything about it. Every time they try to gain some respect for their job and better their ways of life they are counter attacked by the company who has much more power.

United States is getting advantage of this people’s need to treat them the way they want. This is an injustice that we ourselves are supporting without even noticing, by buying so many stuff that we don’t even need, we get them just for luxury and the ones who are really paying for that are all that people working in those factories.

Reflection #5 Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are most of all a mental sickness but eventually will affect the whole body. People look at themselves on a mirror and they don’t see themselves as they really are, instead they see themselves fat and never feel good with how they look. Eating disorders afflict millions of people, thousands of which will die from them yearly. There is good news though, eating disorders can be beaten. But first you have to know what you are dealing with.

These problems are product of our own vanity. The press, and many ways of communication have made public many stereotypes of beauty. And with time many women, and an increasing number of men, started to think that if they don’t look like models they are not beautiful. So they start to eat less or eat followed by purging.

There are different kinds of eating disorders. One of them is Anorexia; this is characterized by a significant weight loss resulting from excessive dieting. They do this because Anorexics consider themselves to be fat, no matter what their actual weight is. Often anorexics do not recognize they are underweight and may still "feel fat" at 80 lbs.

Another example is bulimia, Bulimia is characterized by a cycle of binge eating followed by purging to try and rid the body of unwanted calories. Purging methods usually involve vomiting and laxative abuse which can be very dangerous. And sometimes bulimics do excessive exercise. Unlike anorexics, bulimics do realize they have a problem and are more likely to seek help.

There are many institutions made for helping people with eating disorders. But first these people have to accept that they have a problem and are willing to deal with it.

People have to accept themselves as they are; get rid of all the stereotypes that make them feel ugly or fat and understand that no one is perfect.

Reflection #4 The Veiled Threat

This essay is about the life of women in Iran, a country where they don’t have any rights. Men totally rule their lives and every time they make an attempt to rise and gain their respect they are forced down to nothingness. But they never lost faith in the belief that some day Iran will be a country of justice.

What the mainly expresses in this essay is that every time men tries to make women invisible and powerless, they actually made them more visible and powerful. By trying to control women’s lives, men gave them a powerful weapon: every private act or gesture in defiance of official rules is now a strong political statement. This means that while government completely controls women’s life men’s life is also affected since they interact with each other. Even men who initially supported the revolution were affected.

The paragraphs 27 to 30 of this essay are important to this essay because they because of a man who came to the power started to give women some rights like, for example he demanded for women to stop using their veils. Later they started to get many other rights and women where working in every field except clergy. But they started to be accused of betraying their culture and their tradition and after this they started to fall again. Even though they where exempt of their rights gain they made themselves visible to the world in other ways.

These paragraphs are important because they show one of the time when Iranian women raised and fell for their rights and even though they had some support it wasn’t enough. But they never stopped fighting they know that they deserve to be free and will fight for it no matter what happens.

Reflection #3 Spanglish

Spanglish is the fusion of two languages, Spanish and English. When people started immigrating from all over the world to the United States they brought their language and their traditions with them. This people from different countries with very different cultures and traditions started to interact with each other and they started mixing their language. This is how spanglish was formed.

Even though it is commonly used by the Hispanic-Americans in the United States with time it has been spreading through many Hispanics countries. For example, in Puerto Rico the official language is Spanish but there has been implemented the English language. But most people never completely learned English, but since almost everything here is in English they started adopting only some words, or the making up words from English.

In the essay Spanglish: the making of a new American language by the Mexican Ilan Stavans he narrates how spanglish came into his life, how was it to live in a community of Hispanics in the U.S. By the time he was there spanlish had already spread across the country and over the years he had grown an admiration to it. This is what brought him to write the essay itself in spanglish. Also this is one of the aspects of the essay that makes it unique.

It is very commonly said that spanglish is a langage used by the uneducated people, but, does this make Stavans an uneducated just because he used spanglish in his essay? If you look into his biography I wouldn’t say that. In fact I don’t think that because you use spanglish you are uneducated at all. For what I see this days people that use spanglish usually speak very well English and Spanish so they are educated and, since they are bilingual, have many more opportunities in life than many others.