Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Citizenship Exam

A citizen is someone that is legally a part a a community. To be a citizen of a country, you have to be native or naturalized, meaning you have to be native or naturalized, meaning you have to be born in that country or you take a test and reject your old country. You can be a citizen of anything: your house, school, neighborhood, state, country and even the world. Citizens are totally different from subjects. A subject is a consumer, a follower and a victim, while citizens are all the opposite. He is a producer, a leader, and he has control. In a democracy, we elect the president, which means, we are the ones to chose who is going to rule. We also have the right to protest; we are the ones in control. Good citizenry should be practiced in every single community. A good citizen should ask himself “What can I do for my community to create more wealth, knowledge, and justice?” — suggested by Dr. Mike Hartoonian of the University of Minnesota.

To be a good citizen of any small and personal community, you have to do your duties. This is one of the main responsibilities citizens have; do what they have to do. We have duties everywhere. For example, at school, we have to come in time and do our homework. At home, we have to do the chores, go to bad at a reasonable time, and more.
The hardest is to be a good citizen at school. One of the reasons is that we have a lot of duties but the most important reason is that it is easy to discriminate against others.. At school and even in the neighborhood, we easily form cliques, groups of people who share interest and which are really hard to be part of, and enemies or people we don’t like. After that is done, you will close your social boundaries and will start discriminating against others.
Being a citizen of a small community is very hard, because you have few responsibilities and everyone knows you. If you have few duties, it is very easy to tell if you didn’t do one and you easily get a bad reputation.

Being a good citizen of a country is also very hard because you easily start hating a group of people. Our parents, our friends, and the media make us have prejudices by making stereotypes. Then we create a bias or a hidden bias (a bias even we don’t know about), which will give us a discriminatory behavior.
A good way to learn hidden bias is to go to Project Implicit, a website made by Harvard students. Once you discover the bias, either you will reinforce it because of people telling what you think is right, or you will eliminate it with your force of will. If the prejudice becomes too big, then there will be huge acts of discrimination that may reach killing the other race which a genocide like the Holocaust. If you don’t eliminate hidden biases this is what will happen.
At some point, a nation is the same as a small community, to be a good citizen, you have to fulfill your duties and responsibilities. It is easier for students since we don’t have that many, but adults have a lot of complicated ones. Those might include voting, paying taxes, etc...

Next goes being a good citizen of the WORLD. One of our main responsibilities as citizens of the world is to try to stop Global Warming.
Global Warming or GW is, obviously, the warming of the Earth. One of the ways teachers teach us is by using the three Rs, which are: reduce, reuse, recycle.
In my opinion, Global Warming is the most important thing that needs the help of every single citizen all around the world. If we don’t stop it, the human race will eventually be extinguished.

By doing all of the above, you will be a perfect citizen and a great help for all the communities you are part of.
You will also be a boundary crosses like Martin Luther King, a black man who lived in America who crossed the boundary of discrimination, or Gandhi, the Indian man who crossed the boundary of bloody wars. You will have crossed the boundary of perfection.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Resolve

The story I chose is Resolve. It talks about life in Haiti for someone who is dying of tuberculosis and has nothing left: no friends, no family, no house, and nothing to drink. It talks about how people living in the streets have to do small jobs to even have a small thing to eat.
To me this story is important because it shows how awful life in Haiti is. People are dying on the streets without any help. Even before the earthquake, Haiti needed help and now it’s become worse.
Now the same thing is happening, but the only difference is that it became a hundred times bigger. There are piles of people dead on the ground, they are even blocking the roads. Haiti needs way more help than it needed before.
If we don’t do anything, and without a government for themselves, the people in Haiti will all die or live a life full of misery.
It has to do with Global citizenship because Haiti needs the help of any country that can help. They need houses to be rebuilt, they need a lot of medication, and a lot more help.