What were your top three important issues? Did these change throughout the evening? What did you learn in the videos? Did you agree or disagree with them? What do you think is the point of the Alternative Breaks class?
Blog posts must be 200-400 words, proofread, and void of common grammatical errors.
Your blog posts are due before the start of class next week.
Please email kualbreaks@gmail.com if you have any questions!
My top three important issues were education, access to food and clean water, and human/civil rights. I am a strong believer in the ideology that knowledge is power, and the best way to elevate oneself is through learning. As a pre-med student, comes as no surprise that I find food and water accessibility to be vital for everyone. So much of the world is impoverished and hungry, and waterborne disease plagues much of the world’s population. General human/civil rights, such as gender, racial, and LGBTQ equality have always been an interest for me. As an ENFP Meyers-Brigg personality type, it’s in my nature to feel compassionately for people.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn’t necessarily say that the videos we watched changed my top three, but they definitely increased the importance I felt about each issue. For example, the immigration video really opened up a new point of view that I had not heard before. It was a topic I knew little about, but knowing now how difficult it truly is to acquire citizenship, it makes me feel much more compassionately for people who are in the United States without documentation. The urban planning and renewal video with “Green the Ghetto” was also really interesting, because it’s an interesting spin on how to improve the area. Rather than dealing directly with the social issues, they aim to change the culture indirectly by improving the environment. The statistics that were given were really eye opening as well. Knowing now that lower-income areas are so much more likely to be close to air-polluting factories really makes me think about how it affects the people living there. I really liked the idea of “greening” the area to affect not only environmental change, but also social change. I also really enjoyed the topic about prison reform. I love that the inmates are given the opportunity to learn trades and educate themselves, which is vital to happiness in life and also to their personal success after prison. It’s another topic I seldom thought about before, but I can now see the importance of.
I think the point of this particular class was to touch on issues that may have ranked lower on many people’s lists, mostly because they didn’t know as much about the issue, which is certainly the category I fell into. Overall, the class was very eye opening and I have a newfound interest in these issues.
The top three most important issues that I choose at the beginning of class were access to food and clean water, human/civil rights and environmental equality. These three issues have great importance to me for many reasons. For access to food and clean water I believe that this might be a bit obvious, but for those that do not have access to food and or clean water are most likely not going to survive for a long period of time without these resources as these are essential to sustain human life. As far as human and civil rights, I strongly believe in equality for humans. Today in our society an abundance of discrimination exists, from racism to homophobia which I believe to be very unnecessary. Sadly, our society is structured in such a way that does not necessarily prevent these occurrences. Environmental equality was my third issue for the fact that our environment has been through so much destruction in the past few decades which has greatly affected our lives. Maybe not directly, but indirectly such as plastics in the Pacific Ocean, trash all over the streets, etc. The videos that we watched were very enlightening. I enjoyed all three of them, but I especially liked the video on prison reform. Prison reform is an issue that most people will just sweep under the rug because they think of these individuals as cold hard criminals, which do not get me wrong they are criminals, but instead of treating them like they are less than human, we need to revise the system to better these individuals lives in prison as a way to improve their lifestyles, relationships and prepare them for the return to society. I enjoyed the video about environmental equality and was able to agree with most points the woman discussed. Lastly, the video on illegal immigration really gave me a new insight on the issue and also gave me a new perspective that I had never pondered. The fact that immigration is illegal is understandable, although I am not certain that I agree one hundred percent. This issue is one that I have never taken time to explore in depth, although the video helped me see things from a completely different perspective.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the reason for discussing these issues in the class was to help us gain a better understanding of issues that were the most important to us. I also think that the issues that we watched videos about were ones that were not as commonly discussed as all the other issues from the list.