I am not a fan of the fact that it is 11:30 pm already. Somehow, my days are getting skewed later, unintentionally. Oh well.
Anyway, not much to report this evening life-wise. Finished my 3rd of 4 finals. Today was technically the last day of finals, but because of my strep-tastic week last week, which precluded much studying, the law school gods (aka, the Dean of Students) took pity on me and is letting me finish my last exam on Monday. Of which I am super appreciative.
I'd like to say that by Tuesday I'll be done and done with 1L (good bye and good riddance-- even for people not having law school/life crisis, 1L basically sucks. It is a universal truism), but alas this is not really the case. Because we still have the journal writing competition for another week. Whee! And it goes on and on and on...
Today's post is "Soap box," because it is essentially a round up on things I have read, and with which I have either strongly agreed or disagreed. I spend a lot of time on the internet reading articles, and I have "big feelings" about certain things, in the words of my boyfriend. Since a lot of the point of this blog is an outlet to air my thoughts, and to chronicle how I relate to the adult world, from time to time I will take space to comment on certain things I have read.
[To read the article I reference, just copy-paste link into browser. Would take too much space to copy everything here].
1. http://thefire.org/article/14449.html
I am not going to say much about this, because there is not much I could add, except that I agree 110%. One thing you should know about me: I believe in a very broad, very liberal application of free speech. A very close to unrestricted free speech. And I believe that free speech-- as right-- is not something one should only be protected from in terms of the government. If something is a fundamental right-- as we generally conceive those thing codified in the Bill of Rights to be-- then it shouldn't matter who is violating your right or not. What these schools are doing, is wrong. Plain and simple. Free speech wasn't invented so everyone would be nice and courteous to each other all the time. Free speech wasn't invented so people would be shielded from offense, unpleasant discourse, or discomfort. Free speech wasn't invented, so that the only thing a person can openly say or do, is what is "socially accepted" in the area in which that person operates. This is basically, in a nutshell, why I absolutely hate, HATE "political correctness." Other than the fact that reduces what could otherwise be pointed discourse into meaningless drivel, it goes against the very concept of freedom of speech and expression. And to rebut some of the arguments I know people will make: colleges, even private colleges, receive significant federal money from a variety of sources and for a variety of reasons. They are more like quasi-public entities more than anything else. Thus, the same strictures against government intrusion on free speech, should apply to private colleges as well. And no, the types of SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States, for those of you not versed in law school note-taking slang) decisions upholding restrictions of speech and expression at school, are only operative at the high school and lower levels, not at the college level.
2. http://shine.yahoo.com/beauty/teen-girl-petitions-seventeen-magazine-stop-airbrushing-models-130000558.html
I readily admit, the airbrushing and stuff done in popular media, is stupid. It is totally fake and, to be honest, I don't actually think it produces a standard of "beauty" that is particularly attractive in the real world, where all angular bodily shapes have not been air-brushed into soft curves. In real life, people who are as skinny or whatever as the models in magazines, are kind of emaciated and pained looking. Like, I don't think the "I-just-got-out-of-the-Gulag" look is particularly attractive. I admit that for a while, when I was in my early teens, I got caught up in the whole "painfully-thin is in" mentality. But then something happened: I got self-esteem, and self-confidence. I stopped caring what other people thought, or how they would or would not judge me, because I was able to get validation from within, from what I did and accomplished as a person. I did not need it from without. Conforming stopped mattering. And so, I think there is the bigger issue here. The big issue is that so many teens and young adults lack self-confidence, lack the "etre dans son peau" as the French would say, that they so desperately need their worth validated by how much they resemble the opinion of popular culture. That they look to pop culture magazines to measure their self-worth, is profoundly sad. I readily admit that I could stand to lose a few pounds and get back into shape, but this is because I generally feel better and more energized with a few pounds off, not because I want to slip into a size 0. So instead of protesting Seventeen magazine, perhaps this young girl should really be getting to the heart of matter, and encouraging girls to get their self-validation from something more meaningful and less shallow.
3. http://news.yahoo.com/obama-campaigns-julia-draws-partisan-debate-191929780--abc-news-politics.html
That stupid crap like this is what passes for important election information, or is something that the campaigns are spending so much time snipping back and forth over, is indicative of why politics in this country is in shambles. I know, instead of debating rationally the issues and platforms of each side, let's have a cat fight in the media over some stupid, fake graphic thing of a hypothetical woman that one of the campaigns decided to create! Now there's some substance for you. The more I read the news, the more I see that politics is less and less about actual ideas, plans and results, and more about sound bites. I fear for the future.
4. http://news.yahoo.com/book-names-iconic-times-square-kissing-couple-world-215724993--abc-news-topstories.html
I have always loved this picture. Sometimes I wish I could have been part of the "greatest generation." Sometimes I wonder if WWII happened today, if my generation or the current younger generations (X, Y) could have pulled the same thing off-- if we could do what had to be done, messy as it may be, instead of wasting time and lives publicly debating the merits of, idk, the strategic bombing of Germany. When I was in France with my family at age 18, visiting the beaches at Normandy (where my dad's father landed at D-Day), we visited this little town. I heard (and saw the evidence of) the most amazing story: there was this old stone church; on the inside of it, we could see old bullet holes in the walls, some broken glass, and dark stains on the wood benches (which I later learned was 60 year old blood). Around the time of D-Day, there had been a big battle in the fields around the town, between the Allies and the Germans who had control of the area. These two American kids-- I think one was 17 or 18, the other 19 or 20-- were part of the "medic" team, although their "medical" training amounted to a few crash-course weeks in boot camp. During the fiercest of the fighting, one of the kids would take an old wheelbarrow, and run out into the field and collect the wounded, and bring them back to this church, where the other kid would work to sew up, dress, clean and treat the wounded as he could. Injured guys were laid out all over the pews, hence the blood stains. The kid kept going out and bringing them in, the other kid kept fixing them as he could, all while stray bullets and the like were whizzing past, into the walls and glass of the church. I believe the guide told us that the kids also didn't discriminate against the wounded-- they brought Germans as well as Americans into the church. I think the guide told us that once the Germans figured this out, the stopped shooting at the runner, so he was able to pick up more people. I don't remember how many people they were able to bring into the church, but I remember it being a lot.
The guys pulling this off were literally kids-- barely into adulthood; the one kid may not have even reached majority yet. As the time, they were my contemporaries, or a little older. Now, they were younger than me, by several years. And yet they pulled off more in the time span of a battle, than I will probably ever pull off in my life. They had to be more brave, than I will probably ever have to be.
I wonder how many people my own age these days, could do what they did. Or how many essentially high schoolers, could do what they did. I don't discount the contributions of our current service members-- they have to do stuff like this every day and more. But because we are a volunteer system, that is only a small segment of the population. Most people these days don't and won't have to face these situations. WWII required epically more participation in the fighting by young men. And even those at home had to sacrifice, if we were going to definitively win the damn thing. Could that many of us pull together, and get it done? Within a year or so after 9/11, after a truly amazing display of national unity in the aftermath of a true tragedy, we were back to the old bickering and polarized partisan BS. My opinion is, that we have had such difficulty in Iraq and Afghanistan, because we try to conduct our wars to "please all the people all the time"-- namely, so the war and its reality doesn't put anyone out, offend or inconvenience those on the home front. And thus people spend so much time bickering about what should and should not be done. I grant that the Iraq war, conceptually, had "issues." But I don't think anyone except really out-there people could plausibly claim that the Afghan war was without cause. But too much of the war is conducted to please the masses, conscious of its "image" in the presses, which IMHO does a disservice: first, it cripples our ability to win a war decisively and second, and worst, it thus causes it to drag on, wasting American as well as civilian lives. The younger generations are so worried about feeling morally superior, so wrapped up in their own perceptions, that they allow wars to be dragged down and down, taking those fighting and those whose lives are being disrupted, down with them. Given this, could we really fight WWII today? Or would we all be speaking German and/or Japanese?
5. http://www.cracked.com/article_19483_5-birds-with-abilities-that-put-superheroes-to-shame_p2.html
Whoa. Birds are scary as shit, yo. Especially the owl. Holy crap. It's like, nature's version of a predator drone meets a stealth bomber. Remind me to never be a rodent. Also, the Lyre bird? Ah-mazing. That's totally nuts. Isn't it interesting that nature has been able to do things in so-called "lower" life forms, that it has taken idk, 5,000 years of technology and 30,000 years of brain development for humanity to reproduce? Finally, I wonder if this means that you could in theory reverse-engineer an Ostrich's DNA, to recreate a T-Rex. Although, why would you want to?
6. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/al-qaida-letter-seized-bin-laden-compound-fox-154510302.html
This has got to be the worst insult, like, ever. The whole crux of a major terror plot, hinges its ultimate success/desired results, on the fact that the people planning it, think you utterly suck at your job. Ouch. Sucks to be Joe Biden today. I don't know why everyone hates on Biden so much. I mean, he's kind of innocuous. Like, he's just kind of... there. But again, maybe that's the point. Honestly, people make fun of Biden's verbal gaffes and "dirty" mouth, but I think there should be more "F" bombs in politics. Seriously. It would make politics more "real," people relating to each other on a more "human" level, rather than people putting on aires and politicking and all that crap all the time. Politics, I think, would actually be helped by people relating to each other, and discussing things, like actual people...
Also, LOL Fox News...
Well that's all for tonight. Now I have to do the damn dishes. I feel like I am always doing the dishes. That and homework. Alas.
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