You'll Pay For This Someday.. (Literally)

            We live in a culture that relies heavily on our technology and the internet. I can think of multiple times where I’ve talked to my parents about researching something to where they have replied with, “When I was a kid there was no such thing as google, we did all of our research out of a book!” While I’m sure a lot of the kids in my generation have heard stories similar to this, it would be impossible for us to change how we were taught to do school work. We were raised around technology that has continued to grow over the years and become the most important factor in our social lives, business, and education. There is a current proposition stating that the government would like to take away the freedom of technically-free internet. While we currently have to pay the fees to Mediacom or whatever provider serves you, this gives you service that unleashes the entire internet at your will. This Net Neutrality act would take away that freedom and you would likely end up having to pay for the websites that you use as well, sort of like cable.

Personally, I don’t see how anyone could find this a good idea being that there are many benefits to net neutrality in America. The first being that anyone with access to a laptop can use the internet, and there are many places where people without computers can use them as well, such as public libraries. This makes it easy for people without jobs or the finances necessary to afford internet to fill out applications being that a lot of businesses have gone paperless. In my own endeavors of finding a job, more than ¾ of the employers I applied for had online-only applications. We can’t expect the unemployed to find jobs when they have to pay for the websites simply to access the application. Another reason behind this would be in the realm of education, in relation to college tuition. Americans spend unreasonable amounts of money on college tuition in comparison to other countries, and to tack on the bill of having to pay to use the websites necessary to research as well as to do homework and turn in assignments would make paying for our educations even more of a burden. While this is important so is openness of the internet, the right to have free knowledge at our fingertips. My generation especially is constantly being told to educate ourselves, stay tuned in to current issues, and see the effect that we are having on the world and our culture. These things are sometimes impossible to do without use of the internet. While not everything you find on here is true, it is essential that we still have access to it because under certain circumstances when one cannot afford television, there is no other way to hear except through the grapevine, which is probably more unreliable than the sketchy websites you can run across on the internet.

On a website called gizmodo.com there is an article I found called How to Explain Net Neutrality to Your Relatives: A Thanksgiving Guide. This article, written by Eric Limer, puts this whole situation in lame terms and makes it easier to understand just what is going on so that you can simply explain it to your older relatives that are not as technology savvy. They use the metaphor that when you buy cable through a provider you pay for certain channels as a package and if you would like extra channels, you have to pay for them separately; This is essentially what the blocking of net neutrality would be doing. An internet service provider would benefit from this largely because they would be able to charge each us for each individual website, or make a good amount of money with packages that grouped websites into categories. Not only would they be able to charge us for the service of having the signal to pick up the internet, but they would also be able to charge as much as they want for the packages because we need to use the internet. I have a theory that if the FCC decides to block net neutrality a lot of people are going to lose it, start riots, ruin a lot of things. Recently, when something with the government doesn’t go right, people riot and I honestly expect nothing less from this. We have to wait quite a while before we get the decision on this issue, but I think this could ruin a lot of business and money towards the economy that run solely off of the internet. There is a lot at stake here and I’m glad I informed myself on the situation for it is definitely something that could affect our society as a whole. 

Saving something bigger than ourselves

“The worst thing I have ever done” was a phrase used by a whale hunter that was featured in the movie Blackfish, a documentary about captured Orca whales. Long before the movie Blackfish had ever come out I hadn't exactly considered the detrimental factors of keeping orca whales captive. I always thought there was a twisted kind of underlying beauty to seeing a performance of an orca whale at SeaWorld. While it is interesting to see such a HUGE animal right before your eyes, but seeing him in such a small confined area in comparison to the vast freedom of the ocean is slightly unsettling. I have always heard about the slaying of dolphins and other ocean creatures and while they seem to be relatively harmless I believe that humans push these kind creatures into violence.

I can’t see why anybody would think what these people are doing is entirely “okay”, the only reason these massive animals are trapped in an enclosure is for profit, which is sickening to me. While I’m sure there are fictional aspects to the movie “We Bought A Zoo”, this certain aspect of Blackfish reminds me of a part in the movie where the main character realizes that there is a brown bear that is in such a small enclosure he becomes depressed. When this happens he makes the change and risks the money to build him a much larger enclosure, knowing that while the bear is here, he wants to make him more comfortable and happy. While I disagree with the entirety of keeping animals enclosed, I know that it is a leisure we have in this world nowadays and I think it’s beautiful that he even made the choice to make the bear more comfortable. While I don’t agree that the whales should be held captive, the conditions in which they are living in, and the way they are transported is volatile.

Something like the Orca Awareness Project is definitely a step in the right direction in dealing with an issue like this. It gets people thinking about what truly is going on with this situation, so they’re more informed on how these animals are truly getting treated. The whales that are in captivity at SeaWorld are not just peaceful animals that are being fed graciously, they’re over sized for the space they’re allotted and they only get bigger from the time they are taken there. As well as the many videos besides Blackfish that are usually glorifying these animals and how talented and well-trained they are, I don’t think a lot of people consider that wild animals were not meant to be trained and that is why these animals occasionally act out, as the behavior is portrayed in the movie. I think it’s very interesting and fundamental that the video on the Orca Awareness Project website capitalizes on exactly what it’s like to be trapped like these whales. It makes a comparison between a human being trapped in a fish bowl and how we would feel so helpless with no way out, just as the whales are when they should be free to roam as they please. People with passionate ideas like this need to more openly voice their opinions because it often leads to very amazing steps towards something better, and maybe even saving more of this entire species. 

Ignorance Is Bliss

            In this day and age artists are constantly trying to come up with something new and exciting, go against the grain, and challenge the mainstream ways. There was an article that I read in our textbook that discussed a book that was doing exactly that. According to this article called, “A Family of a Different Feather”, Sarah Pederson explains how a children’s book made it on the list of most challenged books. At the beginning she says that there are quite a few that you would expect to be on there that house explicit language and violence however, a book named And Tango Makes Three made its way up to the top of the list somehow.

            The children’s book Tango is about a penguin in the zoo that has two dads, in reference to the current debate on same sex marriage, it tries to teach a lesson. I think it’s considered a challenged book simply because it is a topic that is debated greatly and a lot of times people feel they can look down on you for your opinion on it. The author of the book decided that they would take on a story that implied that having two parents of the same sex was okay, and that was probably what alarmed people. Many people have the idea that if you raise a child in that kind of environment, they will turn out the same way, or be mentally unstable and I disagree. A child having two moms, would not make any different of an impact than them having a single mother take care of them, there’s just more support. There is far too much controversy over letting same sex couples live in peace together. In Pederson’s article, she tells a story about how her daughter wanted to know why one of her classmates had two moms, to which she responded that while Sam’s (her classmate) dad wasn’t in the picture anymore, his family found a way to make their situation work best. Next, her daughter just says “Oh, I get it.” And simply drops it. Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world that had minds as open to understanding, like children?

            Pederson ends the article by saying that you can either choose to acknowledge that people will live differently than you and respect that like Tango does or you can act like a bird of a different feather, an ostrich. With the slight background knowledge I had on ostrich’s I realized she was saying you can either be accepting or completely bury your head in the ground. I like that she bashes on people that are against Tango because being accepting and loving towards individuals is something that is truly so easy to understand and do, and somehow so difficult for many to process. This book is trying to teach the lesson that you can’t judge people for what they think or how they choose to live their lives and instead of praising that, we shut it down and make it near impossible to find in any bookstores, like the author also mentioned. In conclusion, I have to agree with the author that if you don’t have anything positive to say about the way people are living their lives, you ought to just stick your head in the ground, for I’m sure they’re not interested in hearing it.