I think America is going in cycles
In this image I see a donkey fighting with an elephant over a puppet, which is a little boy with an american flag on it's chest that is hanging liply from the the wood X that the two animals are holding. I think the donkey represents the Deomcratic party and the elephant represents the Republican party. I think the puppet with the American flag represents the country or the President (The leader of the country). I think the two parties are fighting over who gets to "pull the strings" and controll the country. I think the puppet cant move without the elephant and donkey moving it, just like the nation cant move forward without the Republicans and Democrats working with each other instead of against them.
I think this image represents the political parties that are too busy fighting each because they want to deal with the issue their way that neither party is actually coming up with a resolution to anything. So instead of the parties working together to move the country forward, America simply hangs limply in the balance, being tugged from right to left, but never moving forward. This is like in Gatsby where Tom and Jay are fighting not Daisy’s love, but more for her ownership and in the end neither one really wins.

What happened to shades of gray?

Lately all this talk about TV tokenism has got me thinking about what we in our "politically correct" society consider to be racist or prejudice. I feel that when looking at something like tokenism, people tend to see things in a very definite, yes or no, manner. For example in response to the question is TV tokenism a problem? You could say that yes it is, because it shows that people in a minority group(Racial minorities, homosexuals, women..)are all interchangeable, and that it encourages people to see the group label and not the person. However you could also argue that tokenism ensures that people from minority groups that might normally be passed over are getting on TV, and that it is a step toward minorities having a more central role on TV. So, I think there are always more than one side to issues of prejudice, but that often people are so worried about saying anything that could make them sound prejudice that they look for some definite, black and white argument to prove that they're not. For example I've over heard someone say, "I'm not racist I've got lots of black friends." This statement could be interpreted in a number of different ways. You could say, the fact that they are talking about their views of a few individuals to represent their views of all African Americans is racist because it's talking about those friends as a group, and not as individual people. Or this could be seen as the racial differences don't matter to this person, he's friends with these people because he likes them as people. Now I'm not saying one point is right and one is wrong, I'm simply saying that we need to see things from different perspectives, and not see things in such deffininte terms.

Getting carried away...

During class we talked about how the army mainly targets low income minorities for recruitment. In that discussion many people accused the army of taking advantage of those people and "forcing" them into enlisting by making them feel that because of their economic circumstances they had no other options.
Now, I think that it is terrible that the army uses propaganda like advertisements and video games that glorify war to give people a false impression about just how horrific it can be. However, I think that saying the it is the army that is making low income recruits feel that they have no other option is taking it a step too far. The majority of the people who are in those types of circumstances already felt they don't have other choices, because they have been told by society at large, which could include family, people in their communities, the general media... To say that the military is what is really behind the whole notion, and that if not for them these people would find better ways to live, is ridiculous. Also, don't the people who are enlisting have any personal responsibility to find out some information about what they're signing up for? Beyond that of simply listening to a recruiter or watching a TV add?