Truly Role Models?

While on the New York Times website, I saw a case of another stupid decision. This article was about how Japan’s finance minister was resigning after reportedly showing up at a news conference drunk. This case is just one of many where a respectable man has gotten in trouble for making stupid decisions. We saw Michael Phelps get caught smoking a bong, Chris Brown facing charges for abusing his girlfriend, and now this. Sometimes I wonder what is going threw these people’s heads when they make such stupid decisions. They have more than anyone could wish for, yet they go out and risk all of it doing stupid stuff like this. Sometimes I really wonder whether the people we view as “role models” really deserve it.

Just a Matter of Time...

While on the New York Times website, I found an interesting article about how there is still discrimination problems in Japan. Although it isn’t anything like what the United States had with blacks and slavery, the discrimination in Japan still reminded me of the United States dark past. Japan’s social class called the buraku still face discrimination today because they are thought to be, by Buddhist beliefs, nonhuman because of their “unclean actions”. They were put in separate neighborhoods and given a worse education. Japan has been following the same timeline the United States have when establishing Civil rights acts and such. The only step Japan hasn’t taken that America has is electing a leader from the discriminated class. They have a buraku, Mr. Nonaka, high up in the government, but he still hasn’t reached prime minister, which would show Japan doesn’t discriminate against the buraku anymore. When reading this article, I thought about Obama’s election and how much progress it meant for our nation, and how other nations aren’t ready to make that step yet, like Japan. I also thought about what it takes for people to realize that you shouldn’t discriminate against people, whether they are black or buraku. Huck Finn came to mind, and how Huck had to go on the river with Jim and get to know Jim as a person outside of his expected role in the community to realize that blacks aren’t any different than whites. I’m realize it takes a long time for enough people that can make a difference in Japan to have this one on one experience with a buraku to realize they are the same as everyone else. But that’s why I believe that Japan will make the same progress we, American’s, have made this year by electing president Obama. It just takes a matter of time.

Is Getting Shot at Really Fun?

In a critical essay on The Red Badge of Courage, Sharon Cumberland talks about the difference between a realistic and romantic telling of a war story. I found it very interesting and even comical how, while researching for my junior theme, topics we are discussing in class was discussed in documents I found. It really does prove that Lawler and Logan control the universe. But the point that Cumberland was making was that The Red Badge of Courage tells a war story from the realistic point of view, where war is not glorified and soldiers have problems. Cumberland states, “A romantic telling of this story would have emphasized courage, heroism, and the glorious death rather than cowardice, fear, and rotten corpses. A romantic telling of this story might also have implied that the soldiers were dying in a glorious cause of which God approved, and their souls were going straight to heaven.” I found this very interesting because I have read both types of books, and considered both ones believable, and never questioned how they contradicted each other. I started to think how war is looked at nowadays and I believe it is still romanticized. I think army and navy commercials do this the most, where they show the exciting parts of being in the army or navy, and completely skip over the hard, challenging parts. In one commercial, it tries to draw you in by showing exciting footage of people riding motor boats and jumping out of helicopters. The last picture you see reads, “Navy, accelerate your life” implying that if you join the navy, you’re life will become exciting. These skips over the hard training and work involved even to get to the point where you can jump out of a helicopter. I have a friend whose older brother enrolled in the navy, and dropped out after a month because it was so hard and, as he said, “inhumane”. This shows that the navy romanticizes what they do because it’s not solely excitement and glory, there is also hard work and dedication, neither of which they show in their commercials because those aspects of the navy are unappealing.