Unfair judgements on Obama

Today I'm writing about Barack Obama because I've noticed that yet again I see there is something in the news about trying to make him out to be unpatriotic simply because of his ethnic or religious background. There's always something singling him out because of race and its getting old. Last thing I saw was a picture of him wearing traditional Kenyan garb in 2006 on a visit to Kenya, and this was supposedly leaked by somebody from Clinton's camp, when he was just being respectful trying to respect the customs of the local. It frustrates me when people don't even take into account that Obama's late father himself was Kenyan. I wish people would just judge him on policies not on his appearance.

Gender Communication

Im currently taking a class titled Gender Communication and like always now that I am taking a class about a certain subject every time i see something related to it I notice things that I never noticed before. I notice little things on shows that show how media influences gender roles. Even in movies that are aimed at women, you can see  sexist messages. Today while I was doing some hw i had the tv on and noticed that Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion and although I only caught the ending I was able to see how even in this movie you can see traditional gender roles get supported. The only woman two women who were successful in the business world from their class were angry, serious and seemed bitchy and a little masculine. One of them was even the only woman wearing pants, and she was accused of being unhappy because she was stuck in the business world. And then finally Romy and Michelle themselves were losers until a rich man from their  class came to their rescue and lent them money so they could open up their own store. Again supporting the traditional gender stereotype of male superiority. I wont claim to be a big feminist or anything but I do find it disturbing that Hollywood continues throw these messages at us. It is specially disturbing to know that little kids will watch this movie and think that this is normal and that this is how the world works.

abolition/free speech

As I'm learning more and more about both abolition and freedom of speech the more i see the connection between the two. I always believed that in order to be truly free it is necessary that we possess the freedom of speech. This coincides with abolishment as abolition was about not only freeing slaves but also from giving them their due rights and treating them as the human beings that they are. It's just amazing to me that many people then can fight for freedom of speech and at the same time they fail to support abolitionism. To me this is just a huge hypocrisy how the same people who are fighting for their right to truly be free, continue to ignore the fact that their country is allowing some of their fellow countrymen to be held as slaves solely because of the color of their skin.

first seminar

after the first seminar i realized that we definitely need some time to get used to seminars because at the very beginning we were having an incredibly hard time getting started, because of the fact that we had so much flexibility in how the structure of our seminar was going to be. most of us are used to being in  a class where a prof. or instructor tells us what to talk about, so now that we were in charge of getting dialogue started it took a little while, but after we did it was really easy and thoughts were really flowing.

First post..better late than never...voting

Earlier today I was reading an article about how young Americans don't usually vote. And I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who admitted she's not registered. This really bothered up. Having grown up in the late 80's and 90's I grew up at a time when television itself was doing its fair share to emphasize the power and importance of your vote, yet many people my age don't in fact vote. This is frustrating, as we're getting older people are not voting. Some of these people are the same ones that complain about our government having their own agenda and not doing what's best for its citizens, but as a regular citizen our main voice is our vote, so if we fail to vote, how can we expect the government to even know what our opinion is, much less take it into account when running our nation