#11

  

William Shakespeare, William Yeats, Stephan King, Salvador Dali, Oscar Wilde, Isabel Allende, George Washington, Tomas Jefferson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Snoop Dogg all have one thing in common. They have all been users of a plant native to Central Asia. This little, leafy plant has been in use from the third millennium B.C. for recreational, religious, medicinal, and spiritual purposes. And it has grown (no pun intended) to be one of the biggest debates in today’s American culture.  This plant is called cannabis, or simply known by marijuana.

Proposition 19 was a ballot initiative on November 2, 2010. This proposition would have legalized marijuana-related activities in California. The use of marijuana is allowed for medicinal purposes, but this bill would have allowed everyday people to posses and smoke marijuana in the privacy of their own home or a public establishment licensed for onsite marijuana consumption. If this proposition had passed then any California citizen could have legally up to an ounce of marijuana on them for personal use. The last thing that this bill would have allowed was for the actual growing of marijuana as well for personal use. This bill as everyone knows did not pass but is regardless still a major issue in today’s society.     

Those who were and still are in favor of legalizing marijuana say that this legalization would help lessen the drug trafficking we see from the Mexican drug cartels, because according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy sixty percent of the drug cartel’s profits come from the sale of illegal marijuana. With this profit gone it would cut more than half of the money the cartel makes. Another benefit would be a saving all the money spent on law enforcement for marijuana-related offenses. If it was made legal then the state could tax it creating millions of dollars in tax revenues. Another benefit that many do not think of is tourism and the sale of pipes and marijuana paraphernalia. If people go to Amsterdam for the legal marijuana, I am sure they would much rather go to California to have legal marijuana in a beachside smoke house.

Of course there are many opposed to this idea of legalizing marijuana. Those parties against it believe that it is a direct conflict with Federal Law that states that marijuana is not to be sold and is illegal. Another reason they have is that with the legalization of marijuana would come numerous complications with trafficking, arrests, and possession. To counter the money that many believe would be created with the legalization those opposed say that the increased government activity would use it all up, leaving the United States coming up even. Opponents also believe that it could create a huge public safety risk, creating more accidents while under the influence, and hospital visits. Another complaint is that it would out the growers of medical marijuana out of business if anybody could grow their own plants.

So we have opposition from both sides and at every different level of government. We shall have to see what happens in the coming years, who knows marijuana could become legal in the next ten years or it could stay illegal forever.   

#10

In 1960 the social norms were much stricter than they are today. In the 60s the rigid, social norms that had been in place for so long had started to finally break down. We had the rise of the counterculture and the Hippies with their motto of “Free Love”. But the conservative group still controlled what was deemed socially correct and the opposing social movement was labeled immoral and wrong. So we can see the beginning of the movement of the relaxation of certain social taboos, but it is not until our modern ear that we have seen the culmination of these social movements. And the biggest example of this changing social attitude can be seen in the language we use and the language we still do not use in the media. Many of the shows popular today would have been taboo in the 1960s. I believe that as society progresses we become more accepting of the taboos of the previous generations. So where does this acceptance stop, or does it only keep progressing until there are no taboos left in our society?

With this new acceptance of language taboos of the past our media has started to show topics and say words that have never been allowed before. On television today we can see women talking about having multiple sex partners, people cussing when they get mad, violence is seen running rampant, and we even have a show that stars competing Queens! We have progressed past the taboo social norms of the past and we actually have reality on television now. Before it was all white picket fences, perfect families, and there was no such thing as violence or cuss words on the television. Now we can see some of the issues and people present in our society. It is so great to turn on the television and see people talking about sex, talking about having children before marriage, to see homosexuals, people of ethnicities other than White, and pretty much real scenarios of modern life. We have progressed past the fake imaginary world that was allowed in the 1960s to showing real life events and characters on the television.

A great example of the acceptance of taboos of the past is that cuss words are now heard on television. It is a fact that everyone in this world has let slip a few cuss words or uses them on a regular basis. Now there is still some resistance to having obscene language allowed in the media but I think it is a useless battle. We have realized that this coarse language is essential to create a level of realness on our television shows because it is so much part of our society today. If a show is not merely using cuss words for shock value then I think that this showed be allowed in the media and not be censored. If someone does not approve of the language then they can simply change the channel, no one is forcing them to watch it!  

#9

We live in the Unites States of American and it is the year 2011. With his statement many would believe that we live in a very diverse and accepting culture. That our citizens enjoy lives full of freedom and are not insulted by racism and sexism anymore. That was old news people; we live in the twentieth century now! Well this belief is completely wrong! Please do not misunderstand me, our country has made huge strides in the field of liberty and erasing and form of discrimination, but it is still present in our society. Nowhere in our society is this issue more apparent than in our media, seen everywhere from the movies that we watch, television, the books we read, and music are all charged with discrimination against ethnicities and sex.

I want to focus on movies, because everyone goes to the movies and they have such an influence in our pop culture and society. Superbad, Shoot ‘Em Up, John Tucker Must Die, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Sweet Home Alabama, all of the Fast and the Furious. All of these movies are misogynistic, a touch racist, and have very stereotypical female characters. This discrimination against females is even seen in our family movies. Movies such as Madagascar, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ice Age all have few female characters; there are always the sidekicks, never the main character. A study I found on News Week shows that there is one female character to every three male characters in family movies, and this is weird that most of these female characters are scantily clad and very pretty (think the Little Mermaid). A study from the University of Southern California analyzed 122 family films between 2006 and 2009 and found that only 29.2 percent of the characters were female. One in four of these female characters wore sexy or alluring clothing, and was also more likely to be pretty. One in five of the female characters had their bellies showing. One in four female characters were shown with a waist so small that “the authors concluded it left ‘little room for a womb or any other internal organs.’ Maybe we could carry them in our purses?” I was shocked when I read this study, and I looked back at all my beloved films from my childhood. Most of them had little to no female character or where inferior to the male character and had to be saved by them. My favorite movie when I was little was Snow White and it is the worst movie if you think about it. Snow White had to live with seven ugly, old men (don’t want to say this, but this would be a great idea for a porno) and in the end has to be kissed by another man to save her. How is this possible in our family films! Most of the movies listed above also have little to no characters that are African American, Asian, Mexican, or any other race out there. Some do have other races but the characters are usually very stereotypical. A perfect example is the Fast and the Furious movies, most of the characters that are non-white are criminals and hustlers.

  

#8

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