I've been thinking alot lately about capitalism. There are not many things in the world that I hate, but capitalism is definitely one of them. I'm a junior and currently broke as hell. I've realized in my life that the one and only thing that streses me out is money. Work, I can do. Homework - I may procrastinate alot - but it gets done. But money you can't automatially get or control. We all (or most of us) have things we have to pay for, and as college students we have a huge time commitment to go to our classes and do all our homework, and along with that some of us have rent and school we have to pay for too. When there is a possibility that you might not be able to pay for something because you don't have the money, nor the time to make the money - that is when things get stressful.
Anyways, the way this connects to capitalism is that we have to pay for this education. The purpose of government is to protect its citizens. How can the government claim to be protecting its citizens if there are people starving on the streets and college students going thousands of dollars into debt to pay for an education?
We talked about this in class a little bit, with the income disparity and the graphs that we looked at. Why is this disparity so huge? Why does our society place such a huge emphasis on having material things and producing stuff when there are so many problems in the world that need to be fixed? We, as a society, need to reevaluate our values and focus on the things that are important in life - our loved ones, feeding the people, education, etc. My question to you is how do we change this? How do we implement a paradigm shift that takes our government's priorities and our societies values off of "national security" and producing material goods that eventually go into huge piles of garbage, and onto things that actually matter?
http://www.storyofstuff.com
This is a sweet little video about our stuff. It really makes you think. It's twenty minutes long but worth it.
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Such a thought-provoking question and video! First of all, I suppose the most important thing is to raise governments’ and people’s awareness to the environmental protection internationally, in order to improve solidarity internationally as well. In the video, it shows that some countries try to export garbage or other useless stuff out of their eyes, but it does not actually solve the problem, instead, it still causes pollution to our environment.
ReplyDeleteAccording to this action, it reveals of lacking or solidarity and sense of community. Individuals should be more forward-looking to the effects or attribution of their own behaviors and actions; a little step goes a long way. For example, people may be more likely to throughout their garbage at a nasty and dirty place rather than a fresh beautiful garden. People either think about why this place is dirty or how to become like this, or why they would do it without feeling guilty. Some people may say because it is dirty already, or the garbage would not impact me that much since I do not live here; some people may say because someone else is doing it. People go shopping likewise, such as buying things they do not need; change the same objects over times, in order to catch up fashion; using stuff which increases pollution(coffee cups). People never stop to think about the consequences and attributions of their behaviors, but personal satisfaction. Thus, people should encourage ourselves the sense of individual importance to society, and how to start from ourselves.
Further, either media or publication shows more positive news to citizens, and try to hind some negative statistics or information to public. In consequences, it leads some bias that everyone lives in affluence, instead of knowing how many people are starving on the street and homeless or how intense the crisis is. People should make judgment about statistics information carefully and try to increase the possibility to exposure and some emergent crisis, and grab more attention from government and public.