Let's not forget about Positivity

When I recently opened Dr.J’s blog, I immediately felt frustrated after seeing all of the posts he had involving problems within our country. Even though the information was very interesting, I did not really enjoy reading the articles because they were so negative. This feeling of frustration reminded me of many of the recent conversations we have had in my Nature of Human Nature class; most of our recent discussions have lead to the many problems that America has right now. America problems themselves are not the main reason for my frustration; the people who represent America’s problems are what frustrate me. When I see posts like “Dumbest Poster Contest”, and when I listen to many people my age talk politics, I am constantly reminded about how many problems our great country has. I sometimes cannot believe how ridiculous people’s ideas about politics are, mainly because people will comment on something that they do not understand. An example of this would be the common misunderstanding that people have of the concept of socialism. I become extremely aggravated when people comment on something that they do not know anything about. Even though Dr.J’s blog brought back my feelings of frustration, one post helped me realize that our country has many great people, and a lot of hope. When I read the article that was attached to Dr.J’s blog post named “The Cheneyists Continue to Invent Reality”, my thoughts about America immediately became positive. The article itself discussed a very negative topic, but I realized that as much as I read about American’s who represent the problematic nature of America, there are actually a lot of American’s who are leading the fight towards positive change. The author of the article, and most of the people who left comments seemed to have intelligent views about the issues in our society, and I felt pretty good about the future of our country. This good feeling about our countries future reminded me of all of the great discussions I have had during my first year of college. In many of my classes, I have discussed many important issues and I have heard great opinions from other bright young minds. I feel that with all of the negativity in the media and all of the problems in our country, we sometimes forget that we have some great people that are leading us into a brighter future.

Do you believe that our society often forgets about the positive aspects of our world? Explain.

In Response to Megan Cooney (3/13/2010)

Q: “Why, do you think, parents will sometimes go to the extremes of either overprotecting their child and giving into every demand of their child?”

Parents act these two different ways for reasons that are related, but the relation between the two parenting styles is not immediately obvious. When parents overprotect their child, they often try to be perfectionists and attempt to prevent anything bad from happening to their child. They believe that if they work hard enough at parenting, then nothing can go wrong for their child. These parents believe that they have complete control over how their children develop, and nothing else affects their children as much as they do. Parents who give in to all their children’s demands usually are the less strict types of parents. These parents believe that they only have a small effect on their children’s development, and so they want to make sure they have a positive effect. This style of parenting involves giving into all of their children’s wants, which usually means little rules and small punishments for misbehavior. It is clear that each style of parenting relates to the amount of control that parents feel they have over their children. I think that parents should know that they do have a significant amount of control over their children, but they also cannot control everything; even more importantly, they will have a small amount of control once their children become adults, so they need to let them learn lessons on their own. I think parenting is one of the main areas of life that involves finding a balance; the two parenting styles involved in the question clearly have not found a balance. Parents go to these extremes because they believe that their actions will have a positive effect on their child if they act a certain way. Even though these parents believe they are doing the right thing for their child, they are usually wrong. The problem is that parents will often not listen to others about their parenting because they believe that their parenting should not be changed. Parents need to be less stubborn about accepting help because their children’s future well being depends on their parenting.

1.Is bad parenting one of the main problems of our society, and if so, how can we fix this problem? (If not, what are the main problems?)

Bias Society

In class on Friday, we discussed Rousseau’s ideas as being right in principle, but wrong in practice. Dr.J made the point that many times in our society, people are correct about their principles, but no one will accept their principles because the person is wrong about the ways in which we should practice their principles. Thinking over this class discussion, I immediately began to realize a common theme from the different ideas we have studied over the course so far. Almost everything we have studied seems to be correct in some way, but many times people will discredit whole ideas because they have a few problems. I feel that if our society is going to make progress, we will need to be less quick to ignore ideas that we do not fully agree with. When we first studied Christianity, many people were quick to ignore all the ideas that this religion offers just because they disagreed with a few. I think it is important that we use some of the ideas that Christianity offers; things like peace, love, and turning the other cheek could be very useful if they were more important in our society. I think another example of this would be Hobbes’ principles. Many people are quick to avoid his ideas because the ideas are pessimistic. If people would actually study his ideas, they would be very useful. Our society is known for being afraid of accepting ideas that are different, and I believe this is one of the major flaws of our society. If we would use our reasoning to consider the actual usefulness of people’s ideas, our society would run a lot more productively.

Is our society bias as a whole, and if so, how can we reduce this bias?