The Way Things Are

I assume I'm not going to be the only person blogging or talking about the Newtown massacre. What I really want to talk about is, where do we go from here? How do we prevent an event like this from happening again?


Since the founding of this country there have been those who are practically married to their guns. They love and respect the 2nd Amendment, and will defend it at all costs. Few nations come close to America in terms of their relationship with guns. We have rallies, conventions, magazines (the reading kind), and TV shows dedicated to these weapons. But can America keep its gun culture after being struck by tragedy after tragedy?

36 states allow citizens to carry concealed guns. In other words, you are allowed to bring a gun into public and have nobody know that you have it. When the constitution was written, handguns hadn't been invented yet. The only guns were rifles that took a rather long time to reload. Would the Founding Fathers really have wanted people to carry hand-sized guns that fired six times more bullets than the rifles of their time?

This is a rifle that can be legally bought. Semi-automatic with a scope and silencer. Great for killing deer, right? 

Those who support the 2nd Amendment on all fronts state that it is an American obligation to obey the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But wasn't slavery mapped out in the constitution? Where would our country be now if everybody said, "Well the Fathers wanted slavery, who are we to change it?"


I propose a vast reworking of the 2nd Amendment. I would make it so that only the mentally fit could buy guns, which would only be hunting rifles and handguns. Semi-automatic rifles serve NO purpose other than for efficient killing. How would you change laws so that horrible events like the one at Newtown never happen again?

Toys They Will Never Play With

Over the last week, our class has discussed the power of modern-day slavery. I found a very interesting photo album online, in which a photographer visited five toy factories in China. The album can be found at this link:
http://imgur.com/a/wrIds

According to the CCCLA, over 75 percent of the world's toys are made in China. This is most likely because of how cheap labor is in China. Labor is cheap because of the poor quality of life given to the workers. Here's one of the photos I found especially striking:


Here, two workers are both sleeping at their work station. While the photo itself has no description, I would assume that they are sleeping because of the long hours that they are forced to work, as we discussed in class. A more general observation is that almost all of the people in this photo album are women. There was only one man that I saw in the entire album. I correlate this to how blacks were treated in the workplace after slavery ended. Women have always been unfairly treated in the workplace, and I think these types of jobs mostly go to women because the factory managers know women can be easily manipulated, especially in a place like China.  Here's another interesting image:

I find that the juxtaposition of the toys to the workers expresses the ignorance most Americans have when buying these toys. Spongebob and Patrick look quite innocent; they are made up of bright, neat plastic and have silly faces. A kid looking at this toy in America wouldn't suspect that it was made by overworked Chinese wage slaves, with masks and hairnets to protect them from chemicals, who are forced to work so long that they sleep where they work.

I though the photographer made an excellent choice to photograph toy factories. Toys look incredibly innocent when in American stores, but these photographs give them a whole new perspective. I recommend you look at all of the other pictures in the album. What other products have this kind of labor that consumers are largely blind to?

Does Hollywood Have an Obligation?

We've read some pretty gruesome accounts of people's lives in American Studies. Chris McCandless starved to death in Into The Wild. Fredrick Douglass and his comrades were beaten mercilessly in his autobiography. I though about what moments over this last year I was challenged the same way I was challenged with these books. After some brief thinking, I couldn't think of any.

I think this could have been one of the most boring years for movies in my whole life. There were exactly two movies I enjoyed in theaters: "The Comedy", and "Beasts of the Southern Wild", both independent films. Every other movie I saw was incredibly boring for the same reason: they were all too nice. All of the tension in this year's movies seemed forced, like in the "historical thriller" movie Argo, where despite all of the seemingly stressful situations, the protagonists succeed without a single scratch on them. Abrasiveness has been weeded out of Blockbuster movies, apparently because it doesn't sell. Movies have become amusement park rides, as oppose to works of art that challenge the viewer.

After I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild with my family my mom said she didn't like the movie because "the dad was so mean to the daughter". For anybody who has seen the movie, the relation between the father and daughter is an incredibly complex and emotional one, which  represents the path to adulthood of the daughter. It's the roughest and hardest to understand moments of our histories that shape us the most, and historians need to understand this to understand America. The horrible moments in America's history should be taught as a lesson so that we can mature as a country. Here is a trailer for the movie:

I think the softness Hollywood is applying to its movies is similar to how some textbooks overly simplify and glorify the USA's history. "Oh, during World War 2 we lent a helping hand to the powers of good and wiped out those darn Nazis!" Well, we also created the most feared weapon in history and used it on two separate Japanese cities, causing unprecedented death and destruction. Is that scene going to be put in Michael Bay's sequel to Pearl Harbor? In the past, Cowboy vs. Indians movies were all the rage. To my knowledge, none of them showed the displaced natives along the Trail of Tears. Aren't these moments in history key to understanding how America became what it is today?

Do you think Hollywood has gotten too loose with making their stories compelling? Is it the duty of Hollywood to show truth and meaning in their movies, or should people have to look elsewhere for compelling stories?