Juliana's RWS 200 Blog

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Blog #9: Get Pumped because..another American Dream blog post!!!!!!

November 06, 2017

We be talkin about the American Dream in CONTEXT! I was skimming the book and a couple chapters caught my attention. For the blog post though I want to focus on the Chapter 5 called "Whose Dream? Gender and the American Dream." This chapter is written by one of the authors of "The American Dream in the 21st Century", Sandra L. Hanson, which caught my attention because I read her bio at the end of the book. As Mrs. Flewelling said, the title gives some insight into the context of the chapter. My chapter's title being "Whose Dream? Gender and the American Dream" makes an obvious connection between the American Dream and Genders. You can expect comparisons and contrasts between women in America and men in America, but I expected her to focus more on the point of view of a women in America trying to take part in the American Dream (that is what it ended up being!). At the very beginning of the text, Hanson begins with a poll that shows t

Blog #8: 1972 American Dreams

October 15, 2017

Walter Fisher, along with the other people we have read texts from, explains the idea of how each person, group, community, or even social class think about the American Dream differently. Some see it as a concrete thing and some see it as a mindset. A big idea Fisher discusses in this text from 1972 is that there are actually two American Dreams. He also calls the American Dream a myth, or rather a "public dream." One of the American Dreams is materialistic in the sense that it is the "rags to riches" success story that has cars, big houses, and fancy clothing to show for it. This dream, Fisher says, is related to "work ethic" and the competition within the system we live in for personal success. He claims that this dream is "compassionless and self-centered." This reminds me of the American Values text we read about. When I read about the part about individualism, the ideas on paper sounded very selfish. Day-to-day, thinking about it does

Blog #7 Americans vs. Foreigners

October 06, 2017

Along with other people whose culture is anything other than American, I think I have an interesting perspective on this article. I grew up in a household that spoke Portuguese, ate Brazilian food, and watched Brazilian TV (yes, you can pay to get Brazilian channels here and you can bet that my parents did that). But I also grew up going to school with people who I spoke English with and ate American-style food and liked watching shows like The Bachelor (sorry guys I really can't relate to this one haha). Because I have been surrounded by American culture my entire life, I have definitely noticed some of the values that Althen mentions in this article. The first one he focuses on is Individualism. I feel like being from liberal California, especially having grown up in the Bay Area and now being in San Diego I am so used to hearing parents allow their children to choose their own path. It seems very normal for people to "live for themselves" rather than for othe

Blog #6 Writing in College

September 20, 2017

In highschool, I had read academic journal articles and scholarly articles for things like research essays. The worrrssttt ones are scientific journals. I remember senior year I was trying to write a research paper on animal agriculture and its affect on the environment and I had to go through so many papers with tons of academic science-y language. It kinda sucked. The good news about this scholarly article is that it's not about science! (even though I love science) So I found that it was easier to read than I was expecting due to my bad experience. But there were some things that made it challenging. The language first of all is pretty difficult. It's not one of those casual reads. Also, all the information is just really dense. The article was like 11 pages of dense information. Kind of scary. I do kind of enjoy the fact that the information isn't subjective though. I like the way Chomsky writes subjectively, but I also feel like sometimes objective writing is nice

Blog #5 Chomsky is making me rethink everything

September 16, 2017

This week we read Chomsky principles 4-7 and those principles include "Shift the Burden," "Attack Solidarity," "Run the Regulators," and "Engineer Elections." I want to focus on Attack Solidarity today though. A claim that he made in this section was that to masters, "solidarity is quite dangerous." That's because the people who want to control everything and have a concentration of wealth and power don't want to spend time thinking about the good of EVERYONE, but rather the good of themselves. And this idea can be seen in many ways. Chomsky writes that politicians have created the idea that "you've got to be for yourself and follow the vile maxim." This works for the really rich, and not for anyone else. He builds this claim by introducing social security and the affects it has had on the country. Social security is always seen as a problem, but Chomsky argues that in fact, it's not even a problem. H

Blog #4 Chomsky Challenging the American Dream

September 10, 2017

I want to start off by saying, regardless of what I've read about Chomsky, I don't think he's anti-American. Seriously. It doesn't make you anti-American to question certain parts of American culture that have been around for a really long time. If anything, that sounds reasonable to me. Things change so much day to day, year to year, century to century. Why is it reasonable to assume something would stick around for so long and not change? Chomsky’s book called the Requiem for the American Dream takes a super interesting (and pretty liberal) stance on the American Dream. He sets aside 10 principles about the “concentration of wealth and power, “ but this week we only got to 3 of them. The first one is reducing democracy. He explains that “inequality has many consequences” and there are some that obvious. For example, we know that inequality leads to the lives of some being worse than others. That’s the whole point. But he brings up the interesting study

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