Culture

When I talk with friends and when I meet someone for the first time I always shake their hand. There are other places that do not shake hands with others and some that shake differently than we do in America. Here we shake hands so many different ways that i never know how someone else will shake hands with me when I try to shake regularly. Another thing is that we do not talk formally to anyone, older people and sometimes even teachers are all just called by their first names. The only times I ever say Mr. or Mrs. is when i meet a girl’s parents or a teacher in school, but I know many people who do not even do that.

I am involved in a group called Young Life. It is a christian group that gets involved at local high schools to tell kids about the bible and how Jesus died so that we could be saved from our sins. We are not a typical christian organization because we do not pressure kids to change their lives around right away, we just show them love and give them something fun to do in their free time. We all get involved in those student’s lives and become close friends with them rather than being authority figures. This group is different from many others because we all care about the kids that we are interracting with and we want to be more involved with them as well.

On thursday i attended CRU at the HUB and listened to a band play; the lead guitarist was wearing flip flops, blue jeans, a dress shirt with the top button unbuttoned, a tie and a suit jacket. The way the giutarist was dressed was very unique, there was no one else in the whole place dressed like that. Another thing i noticed this week was my cousin Shannon who is very good at art, she dresses differently than the rest of us but i really think its cool. I would like to have my own style like she does but I like to wear what is in style. Individuality comes from not caring about what others think of you or what you are wearing, and though I care much less than I did in high school, I still care about what others think of me.

Introduction to American Life

An international student who visits IUP would realize that not all of the people in America look the way that they do in the movies.  The beautiful and handsome, perfect bodied actors and actresses that they see in movies and on TV shows are not the true image of all of the citizens in the U.S.  There could be many reasons for the people on TV being portrayed this way but the main reason I think is that these are the types of people who everyone wants to see.  The people watching the movies and shows want to watch good-looking people, they want to be those people.

It says that americans see the concept of time as a commodity, something that can be wasted, used wisely, and saved.  People think of it as a tangible thing, and they always want more.  I think people see time this way because there is so much to do in this world and never enough time to really do it.  People need sleep and most of them have to work and keep up their property, they do not have the time to do everything they would like to.  People use a lot of time by trying to make more time to spend doing what they want.

Americans do not like interruptions because communication is like throwing a baseball back and forth between two people.  I was raised never to interrupt when someone is talking and because of that I sometimes spend more time talking to someone than what I originally plan.  I only chime in and interrupt if someone is really wrong about something or if we are having a group discussion, any other time I just listen, speak when spoken to or I raise my hand.

Giving gifts does not happen as commonly as in some other places and tends to be limited to family and close friends.  I liked this sentence because giving gifts is something I really enjoy doing.  I usually get the idea that maybe someone would like or appreciate getting a gift from me, just to know that I appreciate them or that I am going to be there to help them and many other reasons as well.  For the most part I do not follow through with the ideas I have because of American society, it is uncommon for people to give gifts unless it is a holiday or special occasion.  Sometimes when I am dating a girl I will give her a gift and a card and write in it “just because it’s today.”

The Global Village Finally Arrives

The whole first paragraph caught my attention because of how many different cultures he mentioned that were near him.  Just being in Southern California he had access to many different cultural things from a coffee drink to a car.  I’m sure each culture was within a certain distance of each other and they were not divided in any way.  They all seem to coincide with one another.

Two positives of a globalized world are that everyone knows about other cultures therefore they are more respectable to others, and with a globalized world people will have more options on how to live their lives by learning about different cultures and seeing how others live.  Two negatives of a globalized world would be that some gangs or groups may form because they belive that their cultures are better than another one, Then there is blending, the histories of different cultures would eventually fade away because of the new cultures that would form from crossing multiple cultures.

Learning From Ladakh

Before introducing money the people traded goods or services to better the community they lived in.  The only uses for money were to buy luxuries but that was a rare thing.  Having someone help on the farm was easy they helped their neightbors. After introducing money to the community everyone felt the need to have more and more.  To get some help on the farm the farmer now has to pay workers if he can afford it.  If the farmer can not make money from the farm he goes to the city for a job or goes to sell his things for a fraction of its true worth.  In the passage the man sold his butter jars really cheap knowing that the salesman would make a bunch of money by selling it to someone else.

It was better when they had no money because as soon as money was introduced the peoples priorities changed.  Instead of improving the community they just became greedy and money hungry.  Before money the people worked together, helped farm and looked out for one another, after money became important to them they started looking out for themselves.  Money changes people no matter who, where or when, money is a destructive thing.

Moral Machines

A catastrophe as extreme as that would never occur.  To have all of those chain reactions occur like that, the program for the technology would have to be pretty basic.  I would hope whoever created the technology would install a program that would recognize the difference between an internal and external accident.  If it were to occur, American citizens would turn on the technology and those involved in the development of it.  They would be angry because they would be afraid of what else might happen in the country because of a mistake. 

Eventually someone will try to recreate morals and install them into a machine but it will never have the same spark of that in a human.  There is a part of us that will never be explained by science therefore it can never be recreated.  You can give a machine rules and program a routine but the human morality will never fully be there.  No one can ever recreate the part of a person that triggers an automatic moral response to a situation.  If someone gets close to adding humanity to a machine people will still know that they are better than the machine, they will essentially own the machine and know that they are superior which will cause problems.

The only positive outcome of artificial intelligence is the access to help and information that the machine has available.  The negative outcomes are that people will lose their jobs, more people will become over weight and unhealthy, we will forget how to do everyday things and eventually forget what it means to be human.  If someday down the road something would end technology there would be no way to survive because everyone would be dependent on the machines.

Technology is always causing me trouble because for one reason I am more of an outdoorsman and a farmer.  I get easily frustrated with my laptop and iPod when they mess up.  There was one instance when i had typed a paper for school and i did procrastinate it but my computer froze after typing my paper and i was forced to shut it down and start again.

 

Morality

When I read the first paragraph Bill Gates was the only name that I recognized at first because he is popular for his achievements, but as I read on i realized that I had heard about Mother Teresa before also.  I had never heard of Norman Borlaug until reading this but now knowing what he has done he is the most admirable of the three.  Saving lives is one of the greatest things anyone could ever do and he saved billions of people by reducing world hunger.  Obviously I would say that Bill Gates was most admirable before learning about the other two, but he most certainly is not.  I believe that helping others should be a top priority in everyone’s life and doing this without expecting anything in return.  Money, fame and prizes do not compare to the feeling of knowing that you did the right thing and put someone else before yourself.

I am not really sure that I know of any popular people or celebrities that I really consider admirable.  Sure I could say that George Strait the king of country music and star of the movie Pure Country is admirable but just because he is famous should not make him so.  The most admirable people I know are my parents, they raised me to be the person I am today and supported me in every decision I have made throughout the years.  Even thought they have not made any big impacts on the world as a whole, they cared for me and even accepted another son into their home.  I grew up without any siblings and even hearing my friends tell me how lucky I was I really did not listen because I knew that siblings would have been great.  Junior year of high school my friend Devon needed somewhere to go and my parents welcomed him with open arms.  My parents are the most admirable people to me.

I believe that everyone has morals and some have more than others, but I also believe that people choose to go against their morals for reasons I will never know.  The way it works is that people are raised with certain family morals, religious morals and self-taught morals.  The first two are self-explanatory but self-taught morals, or so I call them, are the morals that someone wants for themselves.  These morals come out a little at a time throughout a person’s life but they are always there from birth.  These are universal because everyone has some kind of moral, there are so many different ones.

Haidt has five morals harm, fairness, community, authority and purity.  Americans rank authority first out of the five, everyone wants to be in charge and have power.  In America money is power so the more money they have the more influence they have over others.  In order to make more money people need to have a higher position in their career which gives them more authority of the people below them.