A Series of All Too Real Events

There was a recent article I found on the web that really caught my eye. The title of the article was “In Praise of the Ordinary Child” The title alone intrigued me to a high degree, especially since I couldn’t remember the last time I had really seen an “ordinary child” in my school career. The majority of the people currently in my school either have high ambitions and aspirations to accomplish things that would be considered extraordinary to the “ordinary” child. The article then capitalized on my forgetfulness immediately by talking about how you always see students as overworked, stressed, and sometimes generally distraught human beings, with hardly anyone being 100% positive walking through the front door. The article then explains why this phenomenon happens: it’s because parents are continuously criticizing what their kids are doing in school based on their grades and extracurricular activities they participate in. Almost every parent, according to the article, strives for their kids to do their very best or better and it makes students into constantly anxious, depressed and/or all-around angry beings in school. After I finished the article I had to resonate for a minute, because everything the article said was true. Hardly anyone walks into school happy anymore like they did in middle or high school, and those that do are either on a sugar high or are dead on the inside but trying to lighten everyone else’s mood. Everyone constantly complains about their parents being too strict on them and not listening when they tell them so. Everyone’s constantly drained by the end of the day and expected to do a mountain of homework in order to keep their grades. Everyone looks ok at school but could have a mental break any second of the day. Lastly, most students usually end up being in an extracurricular activity they don’t want to be in but are pressured to stay. These points are all too true throughout America, with relatively few exceptions. It’s a vicious cycle that would end but only if parents would just let their children be ordinary and themselves instead of what they want them to be. Unfortunately for most it almost never will.

Surreal Smog

Recently I was given an article that told in great detail how China has been reacting to its massive smog/polluted air problem over the past few years. Quite frankly, I feel that the government’s actions to control the problem haven’t been enough even with the article’s talk of the new regulations that factories and coal plants in the country will face. My lack of faith in this motion is due to several key factors. The first factor is the fact that the businesses being regulated by the new sanctions are in practically complete control over politics and government legislation passage in the country. Unlike the U.S., China has only just recently been industrialized (compared with the rest of the world) and seem to have reached the major point in their country’s life over whether or not government should have power over companies in the country (effectively being the same question America faced and decided on during the first Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson era of presidents). However, unlike the American experience, it seems that the Chinese government has already given the businesses too much power and can’t do anything to retract that power ,at least for a long time. This will undoubtedly stall any and all things relating to governmental regulation of industrial jobs and businesses, which will only lead to the current problem of smog in China to get even worse. The second factor is the fact that this issue has been going on for way longer than it should have already, so much so that it’s becoming a new norm and has been capitalized on by other commercial businesses, such as those who sell facemasks. This will even further stall legislation since fixing the problem will eliminate what is now being seen as normal in China and, while it may receive praise from the people, will give the industrialists an even better reason to stall on bills: the possibility of recession without intense government action taking place (an amount of action it seems the Chinese government is not willing to use). These are just a few of the reasons why I think the change the people of China are looking for will not come for a while now, even with governmental and industrial compromise.

Smart Money

We recently were given an article on how people with higher grades in high school and college end up making more money than people who get low grades in college and high school. The article uses a graph showing the average yearly earnings of a number of people based on their gpa throughout college and high school. The graph makes the valid point on its own that people with higher GPAs make more money. The article then goes on to explain how this is more than likely because of how people with higher GPAs have better work ethic, a greater motivation to get more work done (leading to promotions/raises), and may have better social skills. I can see why this would be the case. The better work ethic would come from taking hard classes and pulling through them with the best grade possible and through this learning that in order to do well one must fully understand what is asked of them and how to efficiently achieve the objective. The greater motivation would come from their achievement of those grades in those hard classes and how they were rewarded for getting those grades by being put in an even better position to succeed in school and in the working world. Then there’s the social skills. Now, several people would argue that nerds/people with high GPAs are usually anti-social, outcast, timid, etc. However, even with the extensively social nerds, who’s to say that they aren’t applying their learning technique that they get through school to social lives and events, analyzing what jokes get the best response, what topics spark interest, and what just flat out doesn’t create conversation and then practicing in private (considering it’s no closely guarded secret that good social skills will get you far in this world).

Sugary Accusations

In a recent article we were given in class there was talk about how added sugars had the potential to increase the risk of death from heart disease in people. The article later explained that by added sugars it meant all non-natural sugars, such as high-fructose corn syrup and not natural sugars like those in fruit and dairy products. The high intake of these added sugars leads to several other health problems as well, such as obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and even stroke, heart attacks, hypertension, and heart failure. To find this, a researcher by the name of Quanhe Yang and his colleagues conducted a study on 31, 000 people who participated in a health survey that examined dietary habits based on in-person interviews. Now, most would think that this would be undeniable evidence, however the American Beverage Association (or the association you didn’t know existed until just now) has claimed that the study does not show that cardiovascular heart disease is caused by drinking sugar-sweetened beverages. Multiple people would probably be enraged, saying this is just another way of protecting big corporations like Pepsi or Coca-Cola to not go bankrupt and, while it might be just that, there’s really no way of knowing since the article says nothing in depth about the experiment other than Yang and his colleagues studied an old survey and drew conclusions. This shows absolutely no scientific method in this experiment and, therefore, causes its finding to come into question. Especially with such a large claim being made about added sugar. Even though it’s not a huge secret that excessive amounts of added sugar isn’t exactly healthy for you, to make a claim such that it increases the risk of heart disease-related death like smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, you’re going to need more in your article than just your finding on the subject.  

Oceanic Undersight

According to a recent article, the oceans of the world are slowly becoming unable to support the organisms that live within them and could have potentially drastic future effects on us humans. This is due to several factors, most of which are man made. The first factor is global warming that causes the oceans to reach unsafe temperatures for the organisms living inside them near the surface, leading to their eventual heat-related deaths. Another factor is the amount of trash that is dumped into the oceans, particularly plastic, that is able to get into the gills of most fish and around the necks of other marine life strangling them to death. Another main factor leading to the deaths of the oceans is overfishing in general. Whether for food or for sport, fishing is a major way of spending time all across the globe. Because of this there is a high chance certain populations of marine life could be fished to extinction, eliminating their presence from this Earth completely. A final factor affect our oceans is toxic chemicals from factories being dumped into them. Not only does this lead to overall marine life death, but it also poisons drinking supplies and washing water for communities. In other words, by poisoning and slowly killing our oceans with these factors that have easy alternatives, we are poisoning our future survival as a species. The worst part about this is that there are easy alternatives to every single one of these factors that would save the oceans, if we used them enough. To solve global warming have less factories producing greenhouse gases, to solve the trash recycle what is recyclable and put the rest inside the earth or burn it, to solve the overfishing put more regulations in place for fishermen (like with deer hunting), and to solve to poisons from factories going to oceans scrub out all of the toxic chemicals and dispose of them in a more proper manner.    

Ironically Ignored...Because it Should Be

There has been a new study surrounding the meat industry with a general conclusion that people who eat more processed meat are at a higher risk of getting cancer over time. While it’s not as drastic of an increase compared to other consumables that increase the risk of getting cancer, such as tobacco, it’s still said to have a profound effect. However, the majority of people should not start freaking out and going all out vegetarian from here on in. Humans have been eating processed meat for decades now and it’s not likely that you’ll start seeing the meat industry being restricted in federal courts on how the can advertise or sell their products, mainly because of the risk increase being very small. People who eat processed meat were recorded to have 2 times the chance of getting cancer than people who didn’t, but compared to tobacco increasing a person’s risk of cancer by 20 times it doesn’t really stack up as a complete endangerment to humans. In other words, you have just about the same risk of getting cancer as walking outside in the sun. We, as humans, try and avoid things that cause cancer for the most part (tobacco, radiation, etc.) ,but freaking out over every little thing that increases the risk of cancer just slightly is pointless. In fact, a lot of the things we need to have to survive as humans has a slight increase to the risk of cancer. The main contenders of this trait are sunlight and water, so to freak out over meats being identified as increasing the chance of getting cancer isn’t really much to worry about overall. It might cause people to eat a little less hotdogs and bacon, granted, but it most certainly is not worth everyone becoming a vegetarian. What should happen is everyone living their lives how they want to live them with this little fun fact simply tucked away in their minds, either to be forgotten or to remind them that they’re very much mortal beings. 

Teenage Transcendancy

I recently was given an article that talked about how the U.S. teen birth rate has been dramatically increasing over the past few years. Now, me being a guy, I have no idea how most of that works for those of the female gender and quite frankly I don’t want to know, but there is one thing I found interesting that the researchers who wrote the article said: one of the main reasons the teen birthrate has been declining so much over the past few years is because teens have developed the ability to better respond to environmental conditions and think of long term consequences more. I found this main idea of a paragraph within the article not only interesting because it actually credited teens with having abilities to respond to certain environmental stimuli (considering all the crap we get from psychologists saying we’re forever underdeveloped) but also because it showed how teenagers can pick up on certain trends in society and change them for what they feel is best for the future. It has finally come to be known that the majority of teens do not act completely on impulses and that now the majority of teens seem to be able to act with the knowledge of the consequences of our actions. While this may have been assumed by some, many people today do not think teens act with consequences in mind. As I said earlier, we’re constantly ratted on for being inconsistent and completely impulsive by most psychologists today, especially when they want to sell a new parenting book (not to offend all psychologists, however, most do actually good work that benefits rather than work that completely regards an entire age grouping as completely and utterly ineffective at decision making) and now, with this new article being created, we’re finally given at least some credit for not being as finicky and fickle as adults used to consider us. Now, if only this would be seen by everyone...