The Emphatic Civilisation: Reflection

           After watching The Emphatic Civilisation, both the short animated version and the long one he gave as a discussion, I got the whole point that empathy is what we have to feel towards each other because as he states, we have to feel and touch and see what the other person is feeling. In both of the lectures, he starts off with his main point about the monkey experiment and the opening of the peanut and how the monkey's brain neurons activated the same way the human's did when the human opened the nut. He calls this being soft wired and brings up the theory of mirror neurons. That's pretty much how he explains the idea of Empathy and the Emphatic Civilisation. The only difference that he does in the long lecture/ discussion that he makes is that here he goes in depth and starts with an actual introduction that relates to what he is going to talk about. Here in the long version he describes the different eras of consciousness and how it changes according to what the person is living through. Also he describes how the feeling of being tied in to something has gone through changes like starting with religion, to state, to country, to nationality and such.After doing all the analysis he predicts that by the end of the century the human race will be extinct because of the lack of empathy.

   

         One part that standed out in the long discussion is that he said that he can assure that there is no empathy in heaven and how he is giving some sort of apocalyptic imagery. In that part I do kind of agree with that because the whole point of heaven  is that it for those who have already achieved it by doing what the Holy text says. And empathy to me is sounding like that, live with what surrounds us and be who you are to give the best for your community.Because part of being a good person is loving your neighbor.

 

         This idea of empathy sound like the big message Father Gregory Boyle is trying to give in his book Tattoos in the Heart. Kingship and everything else falls into this and how we must live with the world in order to survive in the world. The sad part of all this is that we as Americans are so stuck with ourselves that we lack this idea because we are being sort of brainwashed to think a certain way with the media. Both Father G and Jeremy Rifkin are trying to emphasize this before it is too late to realize, just like it is said in both the lecture and the book. The main message overall is that we have to get free of that blinky consciousnesses that we have and start thing of the bigger picture that is happening in the community.

Final essay promt

Reflecting on this English class we have learned a lot in such a short period of time. We started with politics and economics with the book The Rich and the Rest of US, and then we went and talked a little about religion and how a Jesuit priest views the world by working with homies. During the time slot of the class in the real world, various events happened such as the government shutdown, Obama care, the event on Syria. Most recently was the typhoon that devastated the Philippines. After analyzing the couple of events that transpired in real life while the course of the semester and from the books that we read I came up with the following idea thinking of these books:

How do political and socio-economic as well as natural events that are considered disasters impact an individual’s spiritual life and their way to act upon the event? Does the action taken based upon something that we humans inherit due to the fact that we live here in this world? What is the name of that that makes us feel something for them and makes us commit action for it to the point thatg we write books and stories?

Letter to Chief...

The Hearts of my People

To the Head Chief of the Oakland Police Department,

                 I heard the other day that you have a proposed plan that with the amount of ten million dollars from the funding of the government, you plan to hire 10 new officers and also close the gap on gang violence in Oakland; mainly East Oakland, by approaching the 10 most notorious gang members and offering them job training/ classes using the accept the offer or using the stick method. With all due respect sir, there are a lot of life values that life throws that you should take consideration of before implementing the proposed plan that you currently have on your agenda. I will be focusing on 2 that I consider you should have in your mind when it comes to a good way to reach out to these so called “Notorious Gangsters”. Two of the factors that you should look at when seeing the struggles of these people that try to live day by day and what makes them choose that lifestyle are compassion and kinship

                Compassion is one of the first things that should come into the mind of someone when trying to “categorize” the person. It is the whole idea of walking in someone else’s shoes. As simple as that sounds, it is what most of us forget about when seeing another human beings actions. Gregory Boyles, Jesuit priest who works with homeboy industries and wrote the book Tattoos on the Heart ,he said in the book that “The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather standing in the right place”(pg. 72). Most of these people are somewhat chosen to live these lifestyles due to economic and political/social problems that this country is going through, especially in Our beautiful city of Oakland. To feel and reach out to these people, one must first see what is like to live in a particular neighborhood of Oakland; for example, Soborante Park. Also you can’t just say and automatically assume that because the person dresses in a certain way that person is a gangster and is all bad and always commits all the crimes. Boyles quotes in his book from the bible that “I called you by your name. You are mine…” (55). This means that you have to first cross the boundary of the gangster before you categorize that person in your circles. Also, you have to know the person and find out why they are living the way they are at the moment because something made them choose that lifestyle.

           After you do that step, the other thing you have to do and take into consideration is something that compliments it, which is to obtain kinship with them. “With kinship as the goal, other essential things fall into place; without it, no justice, and no peace” (pg187); Father Gregory Boyles expresses the idea of the result of kinship when you make them come to you naturally. We have to let them open up and make them choose the idea by themselves, instead of threatening them with such crazy idea of making them go to jail if they don’t accept them.

             So instead of making they get forced to accept the idea, why don’t we use that funding for creating alternative community programs so THEY can seek out what they like. Especially for our young population that is being exposed to that environment. If you put them something they like in front of them, they will get the idea of doing bad decisions fall behind. I agree that the additional officers will be beneficiary for our city, as the calls for the need of our people are going to be answered faster. But don’t use them for locking up people. Instead use community programs to reach out to these people to plant the seed. And with that, most likely a better Oakland will get created.

                                                                                                              Sincerely,

                                                                             A college student who has been exposed to                                                                                   that environment 

Mini essay about Tattoos in the Heart

Bringing together a community with love

God doesn’t discriminate you  because he is too busy loving you no matter what actions you take and knows you as a human being and what makes you genuine.

       

          Tattoos to the Heart, written by Father Gregory Boyle, talks about how different experiences he has had working with the homies has influenced on how he views and sees God and how he works on the humans that we are. One of the ideas that he has been thought working with these people is the idea of “Dis-grace”, or why we have the feeling of shame. One of the experiences that help him understand why homies dress and do whatever they do was when he asked a homie in prison if he had any brothers and sisters.  The homie said that they were good and he wasn’t because the fact that he was locked up. Father Gregory explains and says that “… they strut around in protective shells of posturing, which stunts their real and complete selves” (52), after having the thought that Jesuit scholar said that “the principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace” (52). The whole event there made things clear on why people wear what they wear in general and act on actions that lead to their own avenue of emptiness and loneliness. A lot of the homies in the vignettes that father Gregory tells in most of them are missing one thing that they feels they don’t have and that is: love.

          Love is what is missing in these homies and it is what changes completely.  In one of the vignettes; Rigo, the character in it says that his mom comes from very far to see him. “She… takes… seven…buses” (27) just to see him every Sunday after church. That action that she takes is what is meant when something is done with love.

      Another thing love does is get rid of the shame they have or change their view on what they consider the enemy or in general just change. According to Boyle, this “change” happens to everyone and it sometimes takes a long time for the action to happen but it will happen. Joey, a chubby cholo at the age of twenty one experienced this radical change. He would stay all the time hanging out, but one day he tells Boyle that he applied for a job and is working at Chuck E. Cheese as the mouse because Joey said that “in two months, my son’s gonna be born. I want him to come into this world and meet his father- a working man” (119). This story showed how one event in someone’s life can have an impact on what they believe in. The persona doesn’t change because the feeling of love is deep inside the tattoos and loose clothes of them that the only thing they need transpire to them is something to make them push it out and make their expressions show it.

        A lot of us need change in our lives, and that is what father Gregory is trying to emphasize in this book based on what he believes in. You need to allow all these feelings like love and compassion and kinship in order to have your conscience clear and live a good life with morality. Understanding others is understanding yourself because the way you view a person is the reflection of what you think of yourself. That is how the concept of morality works, what a person views as wrong is what someone else views as right. That is the reason you have the power to choose when to let the feeling of love come out because only you know your limits and what is harmful to you and what isn’t. Only you can decide when to bring your community into your life and not be an outcast. Because your persona reflects on the buildup of a community as a whole, making the community genuine and that is why others envy it. They are missing that in their lives and that is why those people try to break that apart. The whole idea of reflection takes place most of the time.

Tattoos on the Heart reflection

  After reading this book I was really I was so into  it that I didn't figure that it was a 207 page book. This book is challenging to capture every single detail due to the fact that it has a lot of short stories within the bigger picture of the chapter. I like how his short stories are written in Parable fashion, which gives us a choice on how to define the deeper meaning and come up with a conclusion after analyzing the story with our own "conscience". All of the stories were good, but the one that grabbed my attention was the one about Cesar and going to JC Penny to buy him some clothes due to the fact that he just got off from prison. The picture that stuck to me the most was when Cesar asked a couple that if he knew them from somewhere and they immediately said no. The reason why that particular image stuck to me was because I had a similar incident happen to me with my friend that was a couple years back in a gang. I was always dressed completely different from what he was wearing and rocked different hairstyles also. But to make things short, this story is the one that I connected most out of all the stories.This story really has thought me and made me reflect a couple of years back of my life. All my friend needed was love because after going to prison, he got himself together and found someone to make a life with. and now they live very happy with a child. This story about Cesar immediately got my attention because it was as if I was in it a couple of years back. And i can put myself in that setting.

Essay 2 thingy about the government shutdown

Government Shutdown: the effects getting more effects 

             The government system of this country is essential to creating a nice flow to social living. Many of the people living in this country depend on government actions and decisions as this country is a “democratic” society, where the people choose their representatives. Now that the government is or was “shutdown” in these past few weeks, what is exactly “at-stake” now that this is happening in the modern world? Many of us argue that ideas such as the American dream and self-reliance are what is at-stake which in part is kind of true. But what we are missing here is that everybody in this country has a different perspective of what these ideas are for them. There are even those that think the opposite; that these ideas don’t exist and nothing is at stake with this government shutdown. But one thing is for sure, something had to be affected due to this shutdown due to the fact that they needed some time to think over some points that needed to be addressed in this upcoming year’s federal budget. As we know, money is what gives you power in a lot of cultures. With that in mind, we have to analyze and figure out what is happening in our society and go on out to the national and then an international level to figure out where we stand in a global scale because we know that the world isn’t perfect and everybody has something that is at stake, both politically and socially. There is a lot of ideas that are good and believed that are at stake, but two major ones that are most relevant in most of todays’ world are the affordable healthcare act and poverty going on in a local community level as well as national level due to the fact that these issues will and are always addressed to our future generations and their economic stability and social status compared to other industrialized nations.

             Obama care, or better known as the presidents’  affordable healthcare act, is an act passed that states in a simple way that “Starting January 1, 2014, most Americans will be required to have health insurance or pay a fine”(KQED).  Restrictions apply to this act and thus not favoring some Americans as well as the other way around the subject. There are a lot of reasons why some citizens love it and others hate it. One of the major ideas is because due to the political party that they believe in. Republicans basically don’t want it because they stand against giving money to social programs, while the democrats face the opposition. In major news sites such as fox news, they have been stating claims in news reports such that “Conservatives in Congress have been extremely vocal about their dislike of Obama's signature domestic policy achievement” (Fox news).  This means that most of the ideas come from the arguments that they have in the house, which then extends like a wave. It means that they are not against it, but rather they don’t like the way it is because of many issues that both parties agree on.

         Internally it seems easy for them, but outside here in society it is a whole different story. Medical insurance is expensive as a whole, but with this act, a lot of people are able to get a medical insurance that they wouldn’t of have been able to get before. But with that comes the negative, now that the are new numbers to get considered “poor”, a lot of people stand out of free health care benefits such as Medical and Medicaid, while others lie in the borderline and such. This makes it hard for people to get insured if they fall between these two especially in the economy that we live in. This is a really important issue that has to be handled as soon as possible because according to the live science staff when comparing the United States healthcare to 7 industrialized nations which are: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, “the United States ranks last on several measures of health system performance compared with six other industrialized nations, according to a new report” (live science). What does that say about how we treat our people? We need to close the gap of uninsured people because being healthy means more productivity. But if we are not healthy, how could we expect for our country to do good economically and socially? No health care means more impoverishment.

           Poverty is a major social issue that is impacting our country as a whole right now. According to Tavis smiley and Cornel west in the book they wrote The Rich and the Rest of Us; “more and more people living in the suburbs are losing their economic stability and landing in the ranks of the poor” (175). Just this concept alone has never existed in America as a whole because it is believed only rich people live in these places. Now to make matters worse, Aaron Sankin in an article he wrote for the Huffington Post stated that “California has a poverty rate of 23.5 percent, the highest of any state in the country, according to figures released this week by the United States Census Bureau”. Now what does this mean? We are living poverty very close to home even though we are blinded with other ideas the media throw out on us.

           One of them is the concept of establishing a federal budget. The federal budget has 2 sections that they put the money they could spend on, which are mandatory and discretionary spending. Mandatory spending is the basic spending this country needs like social security and health care. Whereas discretionary is money that is left over from the mandatory spending and put to sections such as the military and education. According to the National Priorities Project, an organization that follows up in the federal budget, they state in their article Federal Budget 101 that in the 2014 fiscal year, “the federal government will spend around $3.8 trillion”, which makes up about 22 percent of the nation’s economy based on Gross Domestic product. Out of that $3.8 trillion, about “$1.15 trillion to discretionary spending” is how it is getting distributed between the two.

          Here it is with the discretionary spending, this is where the problem starts due to the fact that these funds don’t get distributed how people want them to be, especially political parties. Everything that relates to poverty is tied in to the federal budget because the more they are raising the federal budget gap; the more this country looks bad because of the bad calculations of spending on programs.

        This entire broad but yet intense word that runs in the mouths of everybody now a days is what separates America instead of unifying them, creating more poverty.  An example of this is the 1 percent and the 99 percent Tavis and Cornel talk in their book. What they refer to is that the “incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans- those earning $380,000 or more- have grown over the past 20 years, the income growth for the 90 percent of Americans, including the middle class, has been virtual standstill” (15). What they are trying to impose here is that why is there is such a big gap and why the rich is becoming richer while the poor is becoming poorer?

            As we can see, these problems are what are being pushed back to our future generations. We have to do something to close that gap because if it doesn’t, matters will get worse. We have to rise and come up to be at the same level as the other industrialized nations. We can’t have our economy and social status to suffer because we didn’t address the issues early enough before it becomes almost impossible to fix. We have to battle our internal problems here first that are preventing our engine from starting before we realize that it has become salvage material. What is as stake is the future of our kids here in this country that is called “America”. It will just be a continuous cycle until it is not taken into account in the House of Representatives and the Senate

     

      Works cited

"Republicans Want to Repeal ObamaCare -- but Maybe They'd Keep Some of It." Fox News. FOX News Network, n.d. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.

"National Priorities Project: Democratizing the Federal Budget." National Priorities Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

 "KQED." Public Media. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Sankin, Aaron. "California Poverty Rate Highest In Nation Based On New Census Department Figures." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 14 Nov. 2012. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.

Smiley, Tavis, and Cornel West. The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. New York: Smiley, 2012. Print.

"U.S. Last in Health Care Among 7 Industrialized Countries." LiveScience.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.   

English 1A reflection

My reflection about this class

        When I walked into this classroom, I thought that it was going to be a normal class that a normal teacher usually teaches in an average university.With a written out schedule and such, as well as those boring lectures that make you do useless research. But as the weeks have gone by, I saw that everything wasn't going to be like those classrooms. After reading The Rich and the Rest of Us, my eyes opened and made me look at the world around me in a whole different perspective. I saw that there was people that were living in about the same economic situation or worse. And what made me upset is that is happening here around where I'm living in one of the strongest industrialized nations in the world. Also in the weeks in this classroom, I've increased my knowledge about what social and economic changes are happening here in the United States. Although with all the talk that happens in the classroom, sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed with what it is being talked in the classroom. But for me, this "confusion" makes me want to know more about the topic, so I do a lot of research for both sides of what is being discussed. That way I can come up with my own standpoint in what I believe. All the talk that is happening in the class makes me want to take action, but since there is a lot of sides to the topic, it makes it hard to come up with a place to start. Even coming up with a thesis in the last essay was a bit overwhelming because I dint know how to start it or how to make my point clear on paper.

         As of now, I really don't know where I stand in this class and if I'm doing good or not due to the fact that there is a large amount of sides to the story, which makes it hard to come up with something good. Also the response time for the blogs is a bit confusing because I really don't know how I did in my homework and what I need to improve on when it comes to writing papers because the way I'm supposed to write in this class is something I have never done before in my previous classes. My previous classes gave me topics that usually were about something that happened in history but wasn't recent. Also the way to find information is kind of new because in my other English classes, I usually had to cite texts and articles that I found in school databases. In contrast, this class takes it a step further and actually makes you do research in the web as well as from books to websites that are for and against what your standpoint on the topic is. 

      

         To summarize, I like this class but it can be a bit overwhelming with all the information that we have to process.I felt that before I knew somewhat about politics, but this class has made me realize that it isn't how it is portrayed in the media and such. It makes me want to keep going to class and learn more even though it takes time to process.