The Help: #2

A main part of the book is that Skeeter wants to write a book of memoirs of the maids in Jackson, Mississippi. Her idea is good and she has passion behind it, having lost connection with, Constantine, her maid growing up, but it proves more challenging then she originally thought. None of the maids want to share their stories with her because she is on the other side of the line that is drawn between the blacks and the whites. I understand the maid’s hesitance in complying and sharing their secrets to be published for everyone to read. I still can’t decide whether or not it is realistic that the maids actually share their story with Skeeter. I know that the times were very different back then and there was a huge line between the two communities which makes me feel that it is more convincing that the maids wouldn’t risk their lives and careers for very little reward. Although they finally decide to share their story after a black boy gets beat up for using the wrong restroom I still am not convinced that, that action alone would convince 12 maids to share their stories with Skeeter. Either way that part of the book was interesting and made for a good read and there is no way to really tell if the actions the maids take in the book are characteristic of the time period it was interesting to read and added a lot to the book.

The Help: #1

Overall I really liked the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I liked the multiple plot lines an stories that all intertwined and how it let you see the same event from each characters perspective. One thing I liked the most was reading about the different relationships with the maids and their employers. There was the relationship between the hard headed maid Minny and her employer Celia, the woman who has just moved to town and is desperately trying to fit in and gain acceptance from the other women. Celia uses Minny as a way to try and understand the other woman and how they live while also depending on Minny for guidance about how to fit into the group of women while Celia herself is going through tough emotional miscarriages while desperately trying to have a child. Another relationship that we see is between the progressive thinking Skeeter and her maid growing up, Constantine. Although we don’t actually hear Constantine’s point of view we do hear her voice through Skeeter. Constantine raised Skeeter but unlike the other people in the community she realizes this and remembers the fact that she loved Constantine more than her own mother. She recalls writing her every day in college while only periodically talking to her mother. But, throughout the book Skeeter tries to unravel the mystery of Constantine’s disappearance by writing a book of interviews of other maids to try to get a better understanding of how Constantine felt. Overall one of my favorite parts of the book are the different dynamics between the maids and their employers and trying to get a feel how each relationship and personal connection with the maids is deeper than it looks from the outside. It is very interesting to see how the women depend on their maids so much but desperately try to keep up appearances that they don’t matter at all. There is also the relationship between Aibileen and Elizabeth. Aibileen has raised many children throughout her life as a maid but through her we being to see the relationship between the maids and the children they raise. Her employer Elizabeth is the mother of Mae Mobley. When reading the book you really get a sense of how unclear the line is between race at that time. People refuse to trust blacks in almost all aspects but yet they allow them to live in in their house and raise their children to the point that they kids being calling the maids “Mom.” It shows the irony in the cause that the kids will, most likely, grow up to have a maid of their own one day even though they experienced how close the attachment is to the maid rather than the mother. 

Abortion

1.      The NARAL website explains abortion and says that all women should have the option to make the decision they want (Roe v. Wade 1973). They go on to say that although abortion is legal in America it is not safe. Anti-Choice groups target women’s right to choose and make it hard to get an abortion. NARAL believes that although women have the right to choose there should still be preventative measures in place like birth control and sex education. Doctors, nurses and patients who utilize abortion clinics are harassed daily by pro-life activists. The NARAL website talks about the Crisis Prevention Centers (CPCs) and how they are misleading to women. First of all there are 4,000 CPCs across the country and some of them get tax dollars. The CPCs lie to women about the dangers of abortion and birth control. They tell these vulnerable women that birth control is the same thing as abortion and abortion can make you sterile, cause breast cancer, and convince them that abortion is not the right route.

On the other side of the issue is the National Right to Life or the NRL they explain abortion as any premature expulsion of a human fetus, whether naturally spontaneous, as in a miscarriage, or artificially induced, as in a surgical or chemical abortion. They say 93% of abortions today are done for social reasons. The website also talks about the development of the fetus. Under the alternatives to abortion tab is the number for the CPC hotline to find a place to help women make an informed decision. NRL goes in to vivid detail explaining the different techniques of abortion they use such language as “dead, burned, and shriveled baby” and says that death isn’t unheard of in the mothers. The way it describes partial birth abortion is unnecessary and very graphic.

As someone looking at both the websites it seems that the NARAL is winning the debate. It allows the option for women that want to get an abortion but those who don’t do not have to get one if they don’t want. The NARAL is not imposing views on anyone else but the NRL is. They are giving violent graphic descriptions of the abortions on their website. I also didn’t like how the NRL’s main point was that it isn’t health for the mother to get an abortion and tries to scare women into not getting them. In my opinion scaring people isn’t helping them make an informed decision.

2.      As a 17 year old girl I think that generally a parent should know if a child is having an abortion. I believe that they can be a great support system while she is going through a tough time. But, just because some people might have supportive, loving parents doesn’t mean everyone does. I don’t think that they should be forced to tell their parents, everyone had a different relationship with their mom and dad and in some situations telling them only makes the choice harder. I think that when a teen goes to an abortion clinic they should be told about the benefits of telling their parents and how they could help them in the situation but ultimately it should be her choice to tell her parents or not. Not everyone has the same situation at home and not every parent may support the abortion which makes the decision even harder to make.

3.      I don’t think that the father should have any say over the child until it is born. He is not the one who has to walk around with everyone knowing that he is pregnant for 9 months, he doesn’t have to go to doctor appointments and classes, and most importantly he does not have a child living inside of him. The fetus is part of the woman’s body until the baby is born so I believe she is the only one that has the right to make the decision of an abortion. The man needs to be supportive of a woman’s right to choose but sometimes they are not which makes the decision even more difficult to make and allows the mother to not make an informed decision.

Death Penalty #3

I think that some of the methods used for capital punishment are cruel and unusual. One of them is hanging. Since the website says “instantaneous death rarely occurs” and “If this occurs the face becomes engorged, the tongue protrudes, the eyes pop, the body defecates, and violent movements of the limbs occur” I would consider this a cruel and unusual punishment. I think that the use of a firing squad is also an inhumane way to kill someone. Pinning a target on some ones heart and having 5 people shoot him while he bleeds to death slowly seems very brutal. Electrocution is not used in any states but Nebraska who recently declared it “cruel and unusual” the website says that the prisoner’s “hands often grip the chair and there may be violent movement of the limbs which can result in dislocation or fractures. The tissues swell. Defecation occurs. Steam or smoke rises and there is a smell of burning”. I would consider this torture especially because they continue the electrocution process over and over until the prisoner’s heartbeat stops. The gas chamber has been proven to be an inhuman form of death, even from the holocaust, it is known that death by gas is a slow and painful death. It is not immediate and is a slow suffocation. I think that all these ways are very inhumane and should be considered “cruel and unusual”. I think that lethal injection should be the only route taken when it comes to capital punishment since it puts the prisoner in the least amount of discomfort.

Texas has the highest number of executions; it surpasses the rest of the states with 451 and currently has 342 people on death row. Only 6 states have killed women with a total of 11 women being killed using the death penalty. 14 states do not have the death penalty entirely, including Hawaii and Alaska. California has the most people on death row with 690 but only has 13 executions. Illinois has 15 people on death row and has killed ­­12. While 22 inmates have been executed for crimes they committed while under the age of 18, but, in Roper v. Simmons it was decided that executing someone from a crime they committed as a minor was cruel and unusual punishment. It depends on the state but its seems like more Blacks are on death row then Whites and definitely more minorities are on death row then Whites.  Lethal injection is the most commonly used method of execution. Illinois has life with out parole and the governor has the ability to grant clemency. There was a moratorium imposed on executions because there were many mistakes in the system and Anthony Porter was hours away from being executed when he found innocent. When looking at this data I noticed that there are considerably more executions and people on death row in the south. Additionally the only states that have no death penalty are located in the North. Texas and California use the death penalty more then any other state. I think that, taking population into account, if the ratio of death cases is considerably different between states that something should be done to make the punishment of execution more regulated. There should be guidelines so people aren’t disproportionately or unfairly given capital punishment.

It is interesting that 15 people were given the death penalty when it was a while person killing a black person, but 246 black people have been given the death penalty for killing white men. It should also be noted that 130 people were taken off death row and their innocence was revealed, with those numbers how many were sentenced to die while actually being innocent? Capital punishment does not deter murders. The South accounts for 80% of the murders and they have the highest execution and death row rates. In California it costs the state $250 million for each execution but keeping convicts in life in prison costs much less. Execution is an expensive solution to the problem of criminals and crime prevention. The money could be better used to make schools function better and for them to promote crime prevention programs so that kids in high risk areas don’t resort to killing and end up in the place where their lives are on trial.  

Death Penalty #1: Clifford Boggess

In general I disagree with the death penalty and feel like killing people for killing people is pointless and accomplishes nothing.

In the case of Clifford Boggess I think he should not have been executed. Clifford had a traumatizing childhood being put up for adoption, his parents getting divorced and then being given away again by his adoptive parents. He was not a murderer by nature, but society failing him and the lack of nurture he received turned him into a murderer. He wanted to go to college and have a successful life but when road blocks got in his way he had no family to turn to for money and no one who loved him so instead he resorted to killing people so he could have the life he wanted. Clifford did not have any resources or support like the rest of us have to help us get through hard times in our lives even his uncle, who wasn’t a saint himself, would bash Clifford and say he was an awful human being. Can anyone really survive a childhood like Clifford’s without turning out harmed in some way?

Although Clifford struggled with and somewhat forced his religion towards the end of his life he found a love for painting and expressing himself through an outlet rather than letting his anger come out. I don’t think he could be a functioning member of society but in the many years he spent in prison he did manage to control and focus his anger on something that bettered the community and himself.

Clifford Boggess, like anyone else, does not deserve to die. Just because the system failed Clifford doesn’t mean they should kill him. Despite the setbacks in his life he was able to improve the life he was given and focus the negatives in his life into something good. I think a more fitting punishment for Clifford Boggess is life in prison without the possibility of parole. We can’t fight against murderers by doing the same thing we condemn them for and expect the anger in our society to cease. There needs to be a better way to make sure children are not failed and are given the proper tools to lead a healthy regular life.

Bullying

Bully is a huge problem throughout the United States. Not only because it is prevalent in every school but because it have gotten much worse in the 21^st century. Kids can’t just go home from schools to escape bullying; it follows them wherever they go. Since kids carry a cell phone with them at all times and if they aren’t on the phone they are on the computer it makes it almost impossible for kids to escape from this bully. With bullying taken to the next level it makes kids result to new methods of coping with this harassment including suicide and running away.

            The 15 year old girl Phoebe Prince who committed suicide after being picked on by many older girls for dating one of their boyfriends. She was harassed to the point that she decided to end her own life. Since her suicide her parents have established a scholarship fund with all the donations that were sent to the family. They want to be able to provide other kids with the chance to have a better future. There has also been an increased awareness, as a result of Phoebe and others recent suicides, as to what schools can do to prevent this epidemic from continuing.

            I think that bullying will be at any high school in America, but the extent to which bulling exists will be different with each school. I believe that bullying is not as much of a problem in Deerfield as it is at other schools, or even the middle school. I think that our administration is very strict with the majority of their policies and, as a student, knowing that anything that crosses even the smallest line will get you in trouble definitely limits bullying.  If even one wrong thing gets posted on Facebook, there is anonymous tip, or one punch is thrown, kids are immediately taken to the dean.  It is true in most schools throughout the country that cliques are quite common. Deerfield does have cliques but I don’t think they are a problem. While most people have their core group of friends they are not confined to those limits.

            I think that Challenge Day is a good potential solution to break stereotypes. Having an assembly that is more interactive and is different than “7 Reasons to Leave a Party” would help our society way more than the usual “don’t do drugs” assemblies our school is accustomed to.   Our school does have Snowball which I think is a lot like Challenge Day. I am one of the Teen Directors and the idea of it is to get to know people outside of your comfort zone that you normally wouldn’t interact with. Simply being able to see other people that aren’t necessarily like you as people too prevents bullying. Instead of picking on someone who is different then you, you are able to see that they are a person just like you and they deserve the same respect. Snowball is a program our school district has that isn’t utilized by the students. It has a bad reputation of being a “rehab program” which it most certainly is not. Although I don’t see bullying at our school as being a problem and program that takes kids out of their comfort zone and allows them to interact with new people only decreases bullying.  

Students and the Fourth Ammendment

While I am against drug testing in schools its affects are positive, but event thought it accomplishes what it is supposed to well that does not outweigh the reality that students rights as citizens are being taken away. All people in America, regardless of age, sex, or race are entitled to the same rights that they are innocent until proven guilty. By allowing drug testing it is showing the future citizens of our country that the rights provided to them are not always followed. There are many statistics on how drug testing has benefited schools, drug used dropped from 20% to 5.3%, participation in extracurricular activities increases, and student do better in their school work. And while this evidence is very convincing it is the right of parents to make sure they are keeping track of their children and that they are not using drugs. Schools should not be spending taxpayer’s money on drug test for students but rather parents should be buying drug test for their own children. Schools can’t continue to base searches on “reasonableness” and drug tests on guilty till proven innocent. These are rules that simply go against students’ rights as citizens of the United States and teach kids nothing about the rights they are provided and entitled to.

In the case where a student, N.N.’s cell phone was taken away in school and later searched where explicit pictures were found and she was given a 3 day suspension her rights were violated. I agree even more that drug testing should not be allowed in schools. Students need to be guaranteed the same basic rights that any other citizen of the United States is given.  There was no reason for the school to search her phone because there was neither probable cause nor “reasonableness” provided to schools in the case of searching students. Kids get their cell phones taken away every day in schools but that does not give administrators the right to invade their privacy. Schools are institutions of the government set up to provide students with an education and when schools cross the line and start to take away freedoms, that do not cause a disruption to the education, it becomes illegal.