Hard Work Doesn't Beat Money Even though Money Doesn't Work Hard

It has come to my attention as we read in class the Fitzgerald classic, The Great Gatsby, that there is a growing gap between the rich and the poor in America. Fitzgerald's novel explores the high society of the rich versus lower social classes as a main theme and through this novel I have began to think about what factors determine your social class. The factors I personally believe have to do with you're social class are education, wealth of your family to begin with, neighborhood, race, and gender. Sadly, none of these factors include how hard you work, contrary to the typical American dream. Obama asserts as quoted on the Pew Research Center website that this growing gap between social classes undermines, "America's basic bargain--if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead." This "bargain" is the American dream I mentioned before, but unfortunately it seems to be just that, a dream in our modern day society. There are so many various problems that are stopping the gap from closing between the rich and the poor in our systems in America, including the fact that the better schools are in the better neighborhoods, so where you live automatically determines your level of education and therefore your future job. That leaves little room for movement if you are born into a neighborhood with a high school dropout rate of 1 in 2, which sadly is very common.

However, despite the cold hard facts that hard work just simply doesn't grant access to high society, there are many of us who are still holding on to that American dream. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center,  "35% of Americans agreed that “hard work offers little guarantee of success” while 63% disagreed in our survey last year." Keep holding to that hope America, because maybe what is now pure imagination will become reality. 

Openly Gay NFL Player Scandal

This past week during the NFL draft something revolutionary happened to America's favorite sport, the game of football. Even though it was previously unheard of, an openly gay man was drafted into the NFL. This was arguably the biggest news story of the week and ESPN replayed it over and over again, just to be certain it was seen from sea to shining sea. The Guardian referred to it in awe as, "the kiss watched 'round the world." This is a miracle and a huge leap in a society that would leave a homosexual professional athlete with little or no endorsements if they revealed their sexuality. Michael Sam is living proof that our society has adapted and become more accepting because already as of midweek, "Sam's Rams jersey was the No2 seller among rookies at NFLShop.com." 

However, despite the fact that this is an amazing event that will change the future of professional sports in America, we can't give too much credit to the NFL for making this change happen. They are indeed a business and play to the wants of their fans in order to make a profit. One of the main reasons it would be beneficial to draft Michael Sam for the NFL is that the LGBT community is becoming a larger fan-base. Bragman, the vice-chairman of reputation.com is quoted in The Guardian, commenting on the NFL in regards to the draft of Sam, "It understands very well that LGBT fans are passionate, they have good incomes, they're concentrated in NFL cities." This means that the fanbase of this LGBT community is going to be centered around the major cities that happen to have NFL teams and the NFL wants to speak to the demand of their customer, just as would any other smart business. 

There is also room for criticism of the fact that we were bombarded with this scene of Michael Sam and his boyfriend kissing repeatedly on national television, and yes, of course I am happy for him and what this means for the future of the sport, but why this kiss in particular? I do not believe they would show a heterosexual couple kissing near as many times if at all as this couple on air, simply because a heterosexual kiss is not as "scandalous." The things we see on the news are not the every day accepted things in society, they are the scandals and out there things that people don't hear everyday. This goes to show that as a society we still have some work to do in accepting the LGBT community as nothing different from heterosexuals, because they are still the scandal and not the norm. 

Real Life Junior Theme

The other day I was on my lacrosse bus with the team driving to Notre Dame to watch a college lacrosse game and I passed some vast farm lands. I was aimlessly looking out the window when all of the sudden I spotted it, the very thing I have been studying for the past month now, a real life factory farm. It was everything I had ever read about, with the unwelcoming long metal building and the mud soaked ground with no green grass in sight. However the most shocking part was the feces reservoir which looked like a small swimming pool, yet it was full to the brim with disgusting black sewage. I knew from the many sources I had poured over that these reservoirs, aside from overflowing and causing considerable harm to the water supply, had a tendency to have a terrible odor so I braced myself. Sure enough, I only smelt it for a short minute before we put enough miles between it, yet it was putrid.

I have read so many places about the terrible affects of these factory farms on the townspeople nearby and the environment but it never became real to me that this was a problem effecting America and even effecting places only an hour from me until that moment. Suddenly all those first hand accounts about the stench that I had read in Andrew Kirby's, "Animal Factory," became so much more credible because I had experienced it first hand.

It was especially interesting to me to see the type of town that has these factory farms. There is a reason that in these lower-class rural communities they would put a foul smelling contamination like a factory farm, but in the Northshore suburbs they wouldn't dream of it. This class divide was hinted at in Michael Pollans novel, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and Kirby's. It was all the more real to me to see it in person.

Red Wood to Stainless Steel

As I have been exploring my Junior Theme on factory farming and the truth about where our food comes from in America I have begun to pay attention to more brand names and labels on the food products I consume. I was sitting at the dinner table and drinking a tall glass of milk, something I have had every single night since I can't remember, but I never thought to examine what really lies behind that nice looking label. The label portrays a green field with the bluest sky with just the right amount of cloudsI have ever seen, and the sun is shining so bright it's blinding. All of this makes the product seem natural and from the earth, as it portrays the ideal fresh green field of grass. However, the harsh reality of the food system in America is that the cow from which this milk came from will never actually see the light of day, let alone graze in the fresh green grass.

Dairy milk in our modern day food industry comes from what is called a factory farm, where the cow will spend an accelerated lifespan of just six short months. By the time the cow has finished that time though they might as well wish they were dead, because the entire time they have been standing knee high in their own feces in a pen so small they cannot move around, and constantly fed engineered corn products all hours of the day that make them sick because it is not their natural diet. There is no green grass to be seen, and no sunlight whatsoever entering through the tinted windows in the harsh metal factory.

Lehigh's marketing picture on their cartons of milk could not be farther from the truth, it is simply a tool to appeal to the customers because certainly painting the real picture of the origins of their milk product would not be pretty. In fact the way most American's see their food being made is the way they want to see it, so it is not entirely the companies fault. They want to think that their food is made in a place like this valley of lush green grass and sunlight. They don't want to know or believe that they are endorsing these cruel factories with every daily grocery purchase. The company markets to the consumer's interest, so we as American consumers need to change our standards of food production in order to make any changes to the entire system.

Narrowing Down Junior Theme

As I have narrowed down my "why" questions for Junior theme this past week, I have been going back and forth between mainly two topics. I found myself contemplating the pros and cons of doing sexual assault in America and why so much of the sexual abuse in America goes unreported, versus why factory farms are on the rise. Sexual assault seemed like a topic that could pertain very well to me because I am going to be going to college in a year and it is a very prominent issue on college campuses.

I began to look into sexual assault statistics in America in recent years and was shocked to find out that only 60% of the victims ever report their stories to the police, and even more appalling was that only 97% of the perpetrators ever are convicted. This enlightened me to the fact that this problem is so large in America and also raised the ginormous question, why was this the case that so many people could commit this horrible crime with no consequence?

However, the factory farming and the whole food industry in America interests me a lot as well because it has been in the news lately with animal rights activists taking secret footage of the horrors that occur in factory farms. In the very popular magazine, Rolling Stone, there was an article that appeared, titled , "In the Belly of the Beast." This title itself is dripping with loaded language, by comparing the food industry and factory farming to a savage, wild animal. There are many text bubbles that are enlarged quotes throughout the article, highlighted in blood red, like one from an animal rights activist, which exclaims, "Wherever you stand on eating animals, I think we agree that making their lives hell is too high a price to pay for cheap food." There are very strong activists out there who believe in this issue as one of the most prominent issues in American society today and you can see they feel very strongly towards it by their use of swear words which would normally never be allowed in a formal article. However in this case they are used to convey the very strong sentiments towards the issue.

Since so many people believe so strongly in the issue of factory farming in America today and I have found many resources available easily in the library I have chosen to pursue this topic. However, I still believe sexual assault is a prominent issue in our country today but it is not the best suitable Junior Theme topic for me.

Exploration: The Junior Theme

When I first stared at the assignment sheet for the infamous Junior Theme I had so many different thoughts and topics swirling around in my head that I had no idea where to start. Then as I remembered that I had been blogging about topics that interest me for the whole year I decided to use that as a reference. I noticed that most of my blog posts from the recent couple of months, when I finally started to find my voice as a blogger, were about women's rights and degradation of women in our America today. Being a woman, these topics interest me because they pertain to me the most and are relatable to me and my future.

One topic in particular that was a little more controversial was the topic of pornography. I came across this idea after thinking about areas where many women are degraded and sexualized but I did not want to do a topic that is too common, such as body image or eating disorders. Pornography sounded perfect because there is sexualized degradation of women at an extreme level, however, it is not a commonly covered topic at all. But because pornography isn't exactly socially acceptable and is grotesque I still wasn't sure whether there would be much debate around the issue or enough material to cover.

When I looked up statistics for the pornography industry in the past few years I was surprised how many different interesting areas there were and statistics that shocked me. With technology becoming so prominent in our life recently, I found it shocking that according to Covenant Eyes Porn Stats: Annual Report 2014, 1 in 5 mobile searches are for pornography. According to Facts and Figures, "The sex industry is the most profitable industry in the world".
There are even subtopics that range farther than just degradation of women than I could have ever imagined, such as, porn through the different age groups, how the porn industry has changed in the last century with technology, how porn affects your marriage, and even a bizarre phenomenon with christian men and women after they have watched porn.

It seems like there would be enough here to cover at Junior Theme than I had ever imagined, however, it still worries me how I would organize it. Or how I would slim down the subtopics and not stray too far away from the women involved in it themselves. Overall, I am excited to explore if not this topic, something else that sucks me in.

NSA Imperialism

Recently I learned that college is not in the plan for my cousin who is a senior in High School. I was shocked to hear this because I cannot imagine myself or any of my fellow classmates not going to college, so I wanted to learn more. I learned from my uncle that my cousin is very tech-savy and has landed an internship for a company that most 4 year college graduates would  be lucky to get. He is planning on following his dream career path in computers but his end goal is especially interesting to me. Apparently, he for people in his field the prized job is working for the NSA.

This did not surprise me because I recently studied how the NSA has expanded their surveillance of American citizens dramatically since 9/11. According to a website called Democracy Now, which you can tell from the name is probably bias towards decrease in national security, and therefore the stretch of NSA coverage, "Through a program called "Prefer," the NSA uses text messages to gather data such as travel plans, contacts and credit card information." This is an insane amount of data collection, and to what end? What can be so interesting in these millions of text messages except someone saying, "OMG! so pumped to travel to Florida this weekend!" It seems a little pointless to me to go to these extremes.

 However, they areI, and because of this I can see why they would need to hire so many new tech-savy people like my cousin. I just hope they are not totally disregarding the rights of American citizens in the process. Because in America privacy is a thing that is highly valued. Even in the Declaration it originally preached, "Life, liberty and property," as core American values. And in "property," it was specifically referencing private property because owning something that you can say belongs to you and you only is a major part of individualism, which is the backbone of American ideals.