never a dull week

Crash:

This movie left me hard-pressed to focus in my other class and activities that day. I tend to prefer movies like this—movies with multiple narratives—for the way that one character’s experience somewhat influences how the audience views that of the other characters. It keeps us on our toes. It constantly hits you that life doesn’t perfectly fit together or reconcile, and you can’t escape it. You learn how to live in it. While watching the events unfolding in the racially charged environment that is so pervasive in this film, I couldn’t help but think of everybody in the movie being on a certain page of a book, writing their own narrative. They were all on different pages and didn’t know when their pens would be disturbed, enriched, or charged by an encounter with someone that day or an event that would happen that day. The movements of our pens change throughout the day, the week, the years, and the seasons. This makes me look at my daily encounters with people and think differently. While I can’t leave my subconscious biases at the door, I am becoming more aware of preconceived notions that I have about people, which I didn’t even realize. I’m also in a position of eagerness to let those notions go. A movie like this shows me how ugly it is when we hold onto biases and moves me on a deep level to let any prejudices go. Maybe now I want to “crash” into any of my own misconceptions about people so that I can know about it and deal with it.

Occupy (insert city here) Protests:

Wow, how timely our discussion on classism is given what’s happening all over the country. A couple things struck me after reading about this protest. The first is the use of social media in the spreading of this event and this movement. It speaks of the power that individual people have through the use of social media and information over the internet. This access to information has been seen as a social equalizer and that certainly can apply to this situation. This protest of corporate greed and essentially classism can spread so quickly because the people involved are empowered by the strategic use of the internet while the corporate big-shots can sit and be updated with convenient frequency as the protest grows.

While thinking about what this protest means in the grand scheme of the class struggle in this country, I came across a blog post that talked about the protests as reflecting the crisis of the ideological system of capitalism. The belief capitalism is in jeopardy because the system is so corrupt at this point. Many times in class, our own discussions have ended up with the conclusion that the system of capitalism is harmful, problematic, and distasteful. Thus I recommend taking a look:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/