The podcast and the reading for next day’s class was extremely inspiring and I was kind of shocked to be learning about it. Usually Bezio debunks and exposes us to new, bad things in society, however this has a different tone and message. I particularly liked the passage in the reading my Nelson Mandela when he said “Humans are too simpleminded.. things are covered in hope and love.” This is him writing about hope and happiness when he is in fact a political prisoner. I am usually a pretty optimistic person and I always hold an optimistic view even when looking at events or things that may knock others down. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it is kind of a bad thing and it can make me be too naive. However, this reading reassures me that there are positive people in the world and that the world is not as bad as it sometimes seems.

I also found the story of the microcosm of the Titanic extremely interesting especially given the fact that we have just been talking about movies and entertainment. Everyone loves the Titanic as an amazing and moving love story, however very few people I feel like really dive deep down into the actual meaning and implications of the crash. Even though Jack was a lower class man and Rose was in the upper class, the whole story was basically only about Jack trying to get out of the lower deck while running past all the poor engineers and leaving them to die. I also think it is a really interesting if you look at the Titanic in a sexism or feminist perspective because the women and children did get the first choice to safety. This reminds me of the trolley problem in class when there were men on one side and women on the other, and the question was which side to make the lever turn. We could either run over the men and save the women by taking a stand against the patriarchy, or we can run over the women to ensure equality. It is kind of a double edged sword.

I really liked all of the readings, videos, and podcast for next class! I have never watched the “This is America” or “Formation” music videos before but I have always listened to the songs so I was very surprised and interested to look deeper into the content I am engaging with. Childish Gambino’s music video was kind of like a horror movie or like the reading said, a Grand Theft Auto video game snippet. It was really uncomfortable and sad but that is exactly the point. I remember I read something last semester which said that in order for their to be real change in someone’s perspective or even in society, people need to feel uncomfortable. It is in these moments of horror, shock, and sadness that people actually start to reflect and see why we are feeling this way. This definitely is why This Is America is so profound and important, and how generations to come will definitely study it the way that we study “Alice’s Restaurant”

I thought that song was really interesting and bizarre especially because it was about something so serious like the draft and the Vietnam War. I thought the most interesting part was how the audience was continuously laughing at what the singer was saying because even though it did speak to the inefficiency of the draft, what he was saying and in the way he was saying it was funny. It just showed how flawed the system was back then and especially in a 25 minute song it is just mind blowing to me how popular it was.

I really enjoyed today’s podcast regarding the Yellow Wallpaper because I did read it last semester yet this time there was more information on the author and what she stood for/ how she came to write the story. For example, I thought it was absolutely crazy how they put her on bed rest and then said that she could not read, write, or even feed herself. Reading her background story reminded me of the book/ tv series The Handmaid’s Tale that I recently read for my English class. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian future where substantial amounts of women become infertile, so they have to designate “handmaids” to go to households and carry the husband and wife’s baby for them. These women have to wear big red cloaks all the time and bonnets where their faces are always hidden. They are supposed to be protected by the evil eyes of men and are seen as objects of great fertility and virtue. In training, they look down on women who are promiscuous or even women in the past who used to wear bathing suits. For some reason this story reminded me of the Handmaid’s Tale because it kind of has similar connotations.

For example, the novel paints the future of the nation in a way that is brutal to read and where women are stripped of basically everything. However, reading the story behind the Yellow Wallpaper, it seems pretty similar. This made me kind of scared of our past and how even now in the present we can read a story like the Handmaids Tale or the Yellow Wallpaper and be afraid if that will be our future, yet it was our past. I wonder if we will ever learn from our mistakes as a nation and not make this still be a thing that is written about, but that is too hard to tell.

The readings and podcast for Tuesday talked about Pop Culture and leadership in many different ways. It got me thinking about the pop culture I take in everyday and how I commonly write it off as just my entertainment when I should not. I have been now looking deeper at the shows, movies, books, and music I am consuming and trying to think of their alternative meanings. For example, one of my favorite shows is New Girl and it is a really easy watch for me because it always makes me laugh and is about probably the most random things on the planet. However, it also makes subtle comments about race, gender, ethnicity, politics, that are thrown into the show in an easy way for the audience to digest. One scene I think about in particular is when one of the characters is talking about a white man breaking into a school. In response to this, one character Schmidt asked if anyone did anything about him breaking and when they respond he yelled out “typical!”. It was a really funny moment in the show that also comments about the current political and criminal systems in a way that almost everyone in the audience can understand.

This made me definitely rethink New Girl and appreciate it even more. It also made me realize that you do not have to watch something super serious and heavy to realize cultural and political stances. Things that are easier to watch can also go into the subconscious more and make potentially really serious issues easier to approach and acknowledge.

The podcast and reading for Tuesday were both really interesting and definitely gave me a lot to think about. I have learned last semester a lot about ‘real’ history and the ordinary people who actually made revolutions happen. I also leaned a lot about the importance that Richmond has to U.S. history and present and how lucky we are to live in a city of such historical importance. However, the history is also dark and complicated, plagued with hardship, redlining, and suppression of minority individuals. It made me learn that history is just as relevant as the present and you can not separate history from current events. For example, in Dr. Hayter’s Justice and Civil Society class last semester, he pulled up a map of Richmond and asked us to point out random parts of the city. We would click on a random part of the city and every time, if it was a previously redlined district, then that district would be exponentially hotter than other areas of the city that were not redlined. This held for every part of the city. It was unbelievable to see and it really showed that America’s dark history is unfortunately still relevant and important today. It is even resulting in unintended consequences, like climate change.

Learning about this was really upsetting because as Bezio says in the podcast, “This is not ancient history, it is lived history.” This statement is so true because history books make it seem like the Civil Rights movement happened so many years ago when it is not that far in the past. This deliberate, false distancing from history needs to be stopped and we need to realize that these actions and ideologies are still relevant. This reminds me of the movie Just Mercy because it takes place in the 1980s, 20 years after the Civil Rights movement yet the racist ideologies were so overwhelming and stopping justice.

The ads were really interesting to watch and kind of comical to be honest. I was looking at the 2008 Democratic ads which were endorsed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden and against John McCain and Sarah Palin. There was a common thread for all of the ads where they were all about taxes, money, and “attack ads” against John McCain. There were more ads about John McCain than Obama and they all basically said he was a liar and would get the same results from the Bush administration. The ads rarely actually talked about the real policies that each candidate was advocating and they were all edited really dramatically.

My favorite one was probably the one called “Honor”. It was a 30 second video of just a narrator screaming “Deception”, “Lies” , “Vile” with the screen reflecting the same words in big letters. It then went on to say that McCain was running “the sleaziest ads ever.” I just found it kind of funny because both candidates were doing the same thing and running equally petty and ridiculous ads. It also was my favorite because it did not say anything else of substance or of any proof about either candidate. It just made a bunch of claims about lying and then ended it. It also reminded me of some of the ads I’ve seen in the Trump/ Clinton and Trump/ Biden elections because they had the same formats and had the same narrator scream at the audience about lies and deception.

I found the simulation game fun and interesting at the beginning then I found myself getting really frustrated because I would be failing and by the time I tried to change it, it was too late. I also found that my corn yield was low or I did not have enough transportation fees for the cotton, which were two circumstances that I was not expecting to happen. After I failed the game about three times, I realized that I was making the mistakes that I had literally just learned about in the podcast and in the Dorner reading. I was being reactive, not proactive, to all of the problems that came my way. Maybe this is just a design flaw in the game because you do things like set how much corn you want to farm and then they give you the problem, but still I would wait to fully address the problem. I would try to push the limits of the crops and my family members to see if i could make it to the next session and have the money to send them to the hospital or to switch to cotton. However, this strategy never worked and I realized just how reactive and lazy I was being.

This homework assignment really got me thinking about systemic work and how I kept on trying to change a million big in the simulator when I should have been “redefining” them in little but crucial ways. Further, I also realized that things are not going to change over night or after one session of the simulation. It is interesting how I could not even understand that after the reading and the podcast until I had to put this kind of thinking into action. I am really interested in the criminal justice system and how as a system it is operating in an extremely flawed way. If we want to mend or fix or injustices it is going to take a long time and little important wins to truly fix it. In the podcast when Bezio said that change has to be looked at in a 10 year range, I was a little discouraged because it sounds really daunting. However, it is the only way to get real change done without cutting corners and doing it little by little. It is a good mentality for going through life by taking things a little at a time and not letting your emotions cloud too much of your thinking or rationale (which i do a lot).

This is a screenshot from one of my family’s favorite ads which is a skittle commercial where the boy has teeth for skittles.  A girl walks up to him and kisses him and then walks away with skittles in her mouth. The commercial ends with the famous slogan “Taste The Rainbow” and even adds another slogan that is only apart of this ad which is “french the rainbow”. It is really random and funny and my family has always quoted skittles ads in general because they follow this common thread of just being really odd and attention grabbing. They are all also really short and follow the same format of something random happening, then a large voice comes in and yells the slogan and rainbow pictures of skittles basically get thrown in your face. The ads are short and sweet so they are always fun to watch, however now learning more about marketing strategies I am looking at them differently.

For example, my family would always look skittle commercials up on youtube and watch them for fun, unknowingly being targeted by skittles to buy their products. We would always walk around the house quoting some of the jokes in the commercials and we would all know what we were referring to – the skittles commercials. Now looking back, the commercials actually never say anything about the product and just are full of chaotic, random scenes. I also noticed that they really focus on the rainbow and colorful aspect of skittles (even though that has nothing to do with the taste) and purposefully have either not a lot of colors then have the skittles stand out in the ad, or the whole ad is covered in rainbow. They basically throw their marketing at the audience, and we never consciously realized that it was a part of a marketing strategy. Our “lizard brains” were getting more and more used to seeing and even quoting these ads that it definitely affected our purchasing habits subconsciously. I find this so weird to me because none of these ads say anything about the actual candy, and it actually is kind of gross and unhygienic when you think about someone having teeth of skittles, which are horrible for your teeth. However, none of this reflection actually occurred in me or any of my family members when we were subconsciously being targeted.

I really liked todays podcast about making assumptions and finding the nuance and difference between what we know and what we assume- what we think as normal and what we think as bad. Bezio focused on drug usage and the myths surrounding the war on drugs, marijuana, and oppressing minority communities. The counterculture of the 1960s and the usage of LSD and marijuana motivated these “Just say No” campaigns. This time period is extremely interesting to me and I am even doing my research project on it. Everything Bezio was saying is actually relevant to my project, because it addresses the underlying problems in our society that cause multiple things to happen in different aspects of life. Bezio talked about drugs, dress codes, and religion, and my project is about serial killers.

This seems like a pretty wide range of things that are pretty different, but they are actually pretty similar. I was researching American society’s obsession with Ted Bundy and how he is in Netflix documentaries and movies that everyone is fascinated by. As i was researching I came across a really interesting article that said Ted Bundy is not famous for the heinous crimes he did, but that he is famous for being white. The author of the article said that everyone was so shocked about him being a psychopath because he seemed so “normal”, the picture perfect American. As you dig deeper into why Ted Bundy seemed so normal, it is basically because he was white and society does not typically associate whiteness with crime. This was an extremely interesting connection and assumption that I did not know would connect dress codes to serial killers.

I honestly was expecting my results it was comparing young to old people, which I had a moderate preference to young people over old people. I obviously love my grandparents but some of my friends think old people are really sweet and cute looking but I just don’t feel the same inkling deep down. I was expecting this because maybe I have a fear of getting older and want to stay young forever. I don’t know what else this would further mean, maybe I also have a perception of old people being cranky or mean. I wonder if this bias will shift as I get older or if I could have exposure to limit this bias.