Response to Drunk Driving

The article about drunk driving prevention really got my thinking. I had no idea that the percentage of people who had been killed from drunk drivers was so extremely high. As college freshman, I think this article was a great piece to read and really understand. The author talked about how college students today use designated drivers and how that has become very widely accepted. After reading the article it brought back a memory from this past summer. My best friend Katie’s boyfriend had actually been in a pretty severe drunk driving accident. She called me one day near the end of summer and said that he had been in the accident.
When I asked if they knew who hit him I was shocked by her answer. She told me that he was the one who had been driving drunk. I knew her boyfriend for a while before this and it just seemed strange that he would do something that dumb to risk his own life. As she got deeper into the story, I learned that he had gone out and couldn’t get a designated driver, and actually fell asleep at the wheel and ended up crashing into a tree on the side of the road. He was pretty seriously injured, as I could imagine. He had a broken arm with bruises all over his body and a couple of fractured ribs. I kept thinking to myself, “what if Katie was in the car with him?” I went to visit him in the hospital with her the next day and he looked terrible. He said he was never going to do anything that stupid ever again and I believed him. He could have died and she gave him an earful about it. After all, that night he got in the accident was the night of his twenty-first birthday. Imagine that.
Reading this article really hit home for me. Not only had Katie’s boyfriend been in an accident, but I know many other who have been to, and some of them even fatal. I always was told to never drive drunk or get in the car with anyone who was in the slightest bit intoxicated, and I think after reading this piece and seeing it first hand, that I will be sticking to what I was taught.

Social citizen..or not?

When reading the “Social Citizens” article, I got the feeling that Fines was generalizing our generation as the ones who volunteer. I do agree with this to some extent, but I feel as if a lot of people get a false sense of why many kids and students our age do so much charity work and help out around our communities. I might also be stereotyping when I say this, but kids these days aren’t dumb.
We are told as juniors and seniors in high school to volunteer because it “looks good on college applications.” In my honest opinion I do feel as if that is why our generation is prone to this branding of people who volunteer. I’m not saying that all kids our age fall into this category, but I would say many. I feel this way especially because a vast majority of kids these days are going to college, compared to the times when a college education wasn’t as important as it is now.
What also interested me was Nina Rappaport’s story. I felt like she felt into the category of students that really did volunteer because she wanted to feel selfless, not just because she was forced or felt like she had to. As I kept reading, I was shocked to find out that she wasn’t registered to vote. She explains in the piece that “The system is so corrupt my vote isn’t going to change it, nothing is going to ever change politically.” Although she has a point with the system being corrupt, I don’t see how she can use that as an explanation not to register herself to vote. It made me sort of uncomfortable to read this. Just because you think your vote will not count, doesn’t mean that you cant make a difference. This point in the article really bothered me.
Overall I thought the piece was interesting, but didn’t really capture the other aspects of college students today. I feel like all I kept reading was about volunteering and charity. It was a bit repetitive. We students have a lot more to offer.

Response to Spanier's "Activism"

The article “Is Campus Activism Dead or Just Misguided” really opened me up to a whole new perspective of college students and how we spend our time. I always learned about the important protests of the 60’s and 70’s in history classes, but didn’t really read that much into it until now. Reading Spanier’s article made me realize how lazy college students can seem, for the most part. Spanier was completely right in saying that students tend to spend the majority of their time on Facebook, instead of standing up for a good cause, or getting involved with the community. I would say many students don’t even keep up with world affairs or read the newspaper, and I am including myself in this category. Just yesterday I was talking to my Aunt on the phone about something new related, and I had no idea what she was talking about. She then lectured me on why it’s important to be well rounded and keep up with topics in the paper and around the world. So this article came just at the right time. Thinking about it now, I would say that most if not all of my friends here at James Madison are slacking in the activism department, but it all seemed quite normal not to be pursuing such things. I really gave little to no thought about it. But it’s not just students today. I feel like the majority of Americans in general are not as well versed in worldly affairs as they used to be. I feel like this is a time when everyone should be trying harder to speak out against causes that interest them, especially in this time of economic downturn. This is definitely not the time for us not to worry. Spanier does make some great points, but I don’t think he should get so discouraged just yet.

Discovery

This past summer, I recently found out that my mother could speak pretty fluent Italian. I walked by her one day while she was on the phone with my aunt and I was so surprised to be hearing this. After she hung up I asked why I had never known about this and how I had never heard her after 18 years. When she was younger, she lived with her grandparents who came straight out of Sicily. They spoke Italian around the house nonstop, but I never really had put it together that maybe she learned how to speak it also. So here I am, the summer before I’m about to go away to college, and I am just finding out about this. Not only was I shocked but I was also a little upset. With how big my heritage is, I would have expected to be well aware of her ability. Plus, I thought that my mom had shared everything with me and I felt let down and disappointed. I didn’t know why this was such a secret. After I had a long talk with my mom, I realized that there was so much I didn’t know about her, which ended up being a strange feeling. Growing up and being at this stage in life, you figure you know everything there is to know about your parents. But after listening to my mom, I learned that there was so much I didn’t know about her life growing up. It was all so interesting that I also went to talk to my dad later that night. Talking with my parents really opened me up to this whole new part of their lives that I felt I had never known about. I feel that if others took the chance to sit down with a parent, grandparent or any family member that they could end up finding out a lot more about that person that they maybe didn’t expect. It definitely made me closer with my mom and I truly think others could also learn from my experiences and try the same thing.

Said's "States"

I found the piece written by Said to be really interesting and thought provoking. After reading the little bit of information about his life, the article took a turn and started to give you an insight into the Middle East. Coming from a man who did undergraduate studies at Princeton and received a PhD at Harvard, I knew I was about to read something completely intriguing. The way he described the Arab refugee camps painted such a picture in my head, and even if you couldn’t get a sense of these camps from the article, plenty of pictures were provided, which made it even more interesting. Seeing how much destruction there was gave so much insight into the Palestinian exile. What these people went through is nothing anyone of the modern age could even imagine. Camps were raided and ravaged for supplies. The Arabs were treated as commodities, not as individuals. Said pointed out that the Palestinians were subject to special laws, status and violence, all of which was just furthering the unfair treatment. Reading the article almost gave me a sense of the Holocaust. These people were exiled and even given unique cards to identify them as refugees. Even in their own homeland, they would always be considered aliens. Successful or not, I felt like they couldn’t win either way. It seemed as if they had lost all sense of identity with themselves. After time, it was like the violence they encountered and experienced just became normal. Even among fellow Palestinians, war was breaking out and children’s minds were being corrupted. The author himself even fled the country at a very young age and has yet to return for fear of death and growing violence. Like I mentioned before, these people lost who they were. There wasn’t even proof that they existed anymore, Said states. There has been no census kept for years. He also says that it is definitely near impossible to maintain any sort of identity while in exile. Their whole existence has just been put into ruins.