Low Fertility

Low Fertility

So ... China is overpopulated, and in Canada we have large numbers of elderly people, but small numbers of young people. People in Canada are waiting to have kids and having fewer than in past years. This could be because of the cost to have a child. Some families can only afford to have one, and if they have more, it could put them in a tiny apartment with each parent working two jobs so they can pay for it. People would rather have more luxuries than children, so they decide to have fewer children.

Sicko.

This movie makes me want to move to France.

The end.
:)





Not really.
I don't know why but I never thought that health care was simply a business in United States. For some reason, I just thought that it was the same as Canada. It's hard to believe that the health care is better in a prison than in a hospital, though I think Canada has the same issue with prisons. We're caught between rehabilitation and punishment, and there is no way you can have both. Though I don't understand why the criminals get the rehabilitation, and the sick people get the punishment.

Crazy is as crazy does.

Yesterday during sociology, we had a seminar on “stigma on mental illness”. People are afraid of things they don’t understand, and they don’t know how to react, so they sometimes resort to poking fun.

Just a quick point, during the seminar people had trouble believing that depression was a mental illness. I think this is because the definition may have been misconceived. Yes, people sometimes are in a depressed mood, but someone suffering from depression will have a depressive episode lasting longer than... I believe it is two weeks but I may be mistaken. It's somewhere around two weeks anyway. It's not simply "oh I'm sad" ... it's a bit more complicated than that.

Also, the question was asked what the up side of bipolar disorder (manic depression) was called. [or at least a question to that effect] There's the depressive side, and then the manic side. The mania is the side that is classified as the "highs".

I don’t think the stigma is as bad today as it was a few years ago. Though, I may just think that because I know a lot about mental illness. From personal experience, I know some people are more likely to accept it now. This may be because learning about mental illness is easier now with internet and classes in high school, rather than years ago when we’d simply lock up the “crazies” in an asylum.

The reality is that these days, one of those “crazies” could be right next to you and you’d have no idea until they told you.

Personally, I find people suffering from mental illness interesting. Rather than making fun, I enjoy getting to know them, hearing their thoughts, and comparing them to my own.

It makes me wonder if maybe we’re all a little insane.

The "sexting" ... fad?

A while ago, during class, we read an article on “sexting”. I found this quite interesting because a day or two before that I had watched something about it on Dr. Phil.

A few questions had been brought up in both the article and the show.

The laws are abstract, and don’t focus on “sexting” but rather child pornography, which is different. Child pornography has laws that protect kids from perverted adults. I don’t believe that that should also cover children who give their consent in sending a picture of themselves to other children. When it comes to children forwarding a picture of someone else to all their friends, then I do believe it is against the law. If the person who took the picture didn’t send it to the other kids, then obviously, they didn’t want those people to see it.

Kids make dumb decisions. There’s really nothing we can do about that, and we can’t make a law against it.

“Sexting” has ruined people’s lives, because they never thought that simply pressing send would result in the things that it did. If kids were educated in what could happen, and the consequences that may ensue due to their actions, then most would get the message.

Also, I don’t think that courts should be bothered with something as simple as receiving a text message, I think they should deal with actual laws. In today’s world, if you type in the wrong thing in Google, then you’ll get a semi-nude picture. Why is it against the law if it’s in a text message?

Age Gap

Recently, during class we talked about the age gap between parents and their children. Though I did not input anything into the discussion, I thought it was interesting philosophy.

I decided to write a blog about it, since my parents are 38 and 33 years older than me. This is a rather large gap, considering some parents are only 18 or 20 years older than their children, and mine are nearly double that.

I’m not that close with my parents. I’m not sure if that’s because of the age gap, but I’m sure it could be a factor. I don’t go to them with my problems, which could be because they don’t understand the norms of society today. They know that things have changed, and know that certain things are accepted now that weren’t when they were younger, but they haven’t quite accepted those things themselves. This is rather frustrating for my brother and I.

I have also noticed that my parents don’t quite understand technological advancement. My generation tends to simply accept it without thinking, though we may be the ones at fault there. I didn’t have a microwave up until a couple years ago, simply because my parents didn’t figure that we needed one. We had a stove, why would we need a microwave?

I’ve asked some friends about rules their parents have made, and rules that my parents have made seem to be quite different from theirs. A lot of my friends have no curfew, or a very late one. My parents had to be in before dark when they were younger, and so in today’s society, they figure that 10 is generous. This could be only because of their childhood, but also influenced because of their generation.

Poverty

So.. this doesn't really relate to anything that we've talked about in class specifically. Although it does relate to sociology. It was a random thought that I was simply going to blog about on facebook, but I decided to post it here as well. The topic has been brought up indirectly during class, I believe, therefore I believe it should be an acceptable blog topic.



We’re always told that we have it so good here, and that people in other countries are suffering, starving, living in poverty, etc. It’s a knowledge we have grown to know, but we tend to push it to the back of our minds. Out of sight, out of mind. We would rather not worry about it, because if we did worry about the world’s problems, we’d likely go insane. Therefore, we push it out of reach. If you’ve seen the suffering, then it tends to be an image that haunts the back of your mind, and when someone brings up the topic of people suffering in other countries, the image tends to reappear. It doesn’t leave; it has left its mark.

Think about the roof over your head. Think about the sounds that you hear. Think about the food that you eat. Think about what you smell. Think about the walls you see surrounding you.

When the topic of poverty is brought up, I’m taken back to Peru. I can hear the pigs squealing in my ears. I can feel the wind blowing dirt and sand into my eyes. I can feel the kids running around, tugging at my arms. I can hear the kids laughing, I can see them smiling. I can smell the garbage dump that they live in.

I bring myself back to today, and look around the four walls I’ve lived in for the last 17 years and wonder… what gives me the right to complain?

My morals are not your morals.

Today, during class, we had a debate on religion and morality. I, being too shy to speak up, wrote down some points that I would have liked to say and decided to make it into a journal topic.

People are individuals, who believe different things. This is seen through different people’s views on religion. Then it must be true that people have different morals. For example, if someone withholds the truth from someone else, but is not necessarily asked specifically about that truth, are they lying? Different people will have different answers. Some believe that withholding information is lying, and others believe you must speak untrue words to lie. It’s all about perception and ultimately the person’s beliefs.

People can also perceive religion in the same way. Many religious things, such as verses from the Bible, are left up to interpretation. Especially considering over the years, the Bible has been translated from different languages, and also to modern language, there is bound to be some things that are lost in translation. I remember last year in Mrs. Bright’s sociology class, we went on a trip to the mental hospital in Toronto. There was a man who talked to us about his personal experience with schizophrenia. He mentioned that he believed one voice that he heard to be Jesus, and one was the Devil, so if the voice he believed was Jesus told him to do something, he would do it because he believed it to be Jesus speaking to him. The voice could have easily told him to kill someone, and he may have done it. Therefore morality can be overridden by other beliefs.

This leads into a point that was brought up that I disagree with. It was said during the class that if a religious person swears on the Bible, they will tell the truth. This is an incredibly untrue statement. Religious people lie just as easily as an atheist. They shouldn’t be held up to a higher standard simply because they believe that something happens when they die. In the Bible, women were stoned if they had sex before marriage, does that mean that religious people should kill all women who have pre-marital sex? To my knowledge, most do not do this, because times have changed and things are different. Who is to say they can’t bend other rules, and ask for forgiveness afterwards?

Also, the death penalty was brought up. I just want to note that I don’t believe that the death penalty is an effective punishment. Why would we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? It doesn’t seem logical, in my opinion. Then again, who doesn’t contradict themselves these days?