Freedom

Freedom is the ability to responsibly handle the idea of being able to do anything one imagines. Freedom is being able to choose to sit home doing nothing, but choosing to get up and take advantage of being able to receive an education and work any job one wants. Freedom is being allowed to complain about the government, write letters to the government, and participate in political rallies and not be beaten or arrested. Freedom is what a person makes it to be. Freedom is only freedom if a person takes full advantage of his/her right vote, to buy the groceries one wants, to read, to write, to see, to hear, to speak, to go. People stop being free when they stop doing these things.

Not Quite a Satire

Our English instructor wanted us to write a satire – mine isn’t really a satire I guess. Oh well. I tried.

 

Passing the Pence Amendment would result in cutting all federal funding to the Planned Parenthood program and parts of Women Infants and Children (WIC). Planned Parenthood takes the public’s tax dollars and funds cancer screenings, STD screenings, pregnancy testings, and contraceptives for the lower class. Over a million people take advantage of this program to receive healthcare. The Pence Amendment would stop this and put America’s tax dollars elsewhere.

The only people needing to know if they have cancer are the ones that would be able to afford the treatment. A person taking advantage of the public’s hard earned tax dollars to find out whether or not he/she has cancer obviously does not have the funds to afford expensive cancer treatments. Telling a person that he/she has cancer would simply stress that person out. Allowing a person to die without knowing what is happening would save that individual the sorrow of knowing what is coming. Cutting free cancer screenings would save tax dollars of the people that actually work and sorrow for the people that do not work.

Giving out free STD screenings is a huge flaw in today’s society. People only get STDs from having sexual relations with multiple partners or from homosexual activity. If a person is ready to engage in these lude acts and not be able to afford the consequences, they do not deserve to be apart of this society. STDs are punishments for raunchy lifestyles and nobody should be allowed to use the tax dollars of good hearted, red blooded, hard working Americans to learn what disease they caught.

Pregnancy is a serious issue in this country and should be seen that way. The only type of woman that should be having a baby is a married one. If a woman wants to engage in intercourse out of wedlock, then she should endure every consequence that comes along with it. Contraceptives are given out for free every day and America’s tax dollars pays for it. If a young woman wants to have sex out of wedlock she should not be handed contraceptives by her government. Let her have that child and if she can not afford it then she will be free to apply for Medicaid, Welfare, and Food Stamps. If she will refuse to do that and still have sex then she will be free to go pay and abort the pregnancy. If people want to have sex then the responsibilities of babies should come along with it.

WIC provides lower class women with the funds to buy certain food needed to have a healthy pregnancy and healthy children. A woman should not get pregnant if she cannot afford a child. If a woman does not have the money to buy the nutrients necessary then unborn children and young children do not deserve them. People in the lower class are there because they do not care to work hard enough to be anywhere else. This country’s tax dollars should not go to helping lazy people raise their kids.

Passing the Pence Amendment would be the best thing this country could do. The morals America was built on are crumbling. The Pence Amendment would support good morals and stop providing women with ways to have “safe sex” out of wedlock. The only sex that if safe sex is married sex. America needs to rebuilt and the Pence Amendment would do just that.

 

Here Comes Prom

Tonight is my senior prom. Woah. Am I really this old? Am I really going to be done with high school so soon? Am I really going to be graduating? Will I really not be forced to learn any longer, and still continue to?

My birthday isn’t even a month away and I am going to be 18. I remember when I was younger and always thought it seemed so grown up – yeah right. We are anything but grown. I will say that my friends look more like men and women than kids, but I must say it is just the same as those movies where younger people are trapped in older bodies and vice-versa. Except it is real and it happens to everyone. All 18 means is we can buy more to help kill us, we can have opinions that matter, and we can get into more trouble. So despite the latter, I guess it is pretty good (if we want to buy what we want to kill us, we should be able to, so it is on the good list).

I have not enjoyed the math I never understood. Or the science classes that I read my books in to keep from dying of boredom. The only social class I enjoyed was America History, because I have been a nerd. Staying up too late on papers due the next day was never a pleasure, but that was always a result of my own procrastination. It was high school though. I do not think I will ever refer to it as “the best time of my life.” Things can get better. But I won’t be going through college with people I have known since I was four or five. That is why high school is this way. So many of us have been knowing each other since elementary school. Experiences are different when shared with the people we met before we could think for ourselves.

Graduation will give us a high school diploma, but can we do very much with that? Not really. Graduation is only reassuring us that we will never all be together in such close proximities as we were during high school. All it does is say “Hey, its over. Hope everyone has Facebook (GoogleChrome auto corrected that “f” to be a capital for me), because the government isn’t forcing you to see them ever again!” So basically graduation is just meant to be a festival of tears and planting the idea that we will never see each other again. Awesome.

College is around the corner for a lot of people. We don’t have to learn anymore, and will still want to. But now we have to find scholarships and funds to pay for this new level of schooling, sleeping in a room with a stranger, and for a lot probably a craving to be back home. Fair? Not entirely, but that is the way it works. So nobody will throw too big of a fit over it. And if they do then they can sleep in a tent without strangers or go back home.

I am about to begin the process of getting made of for my senior prom. In five hours some friends will be here. In six hours we will be on our way to spend too much money on food. In nine hours I will be arriving at prom. In twelve hours I will be on my way home to spend more time with my friends. I am not wasting money on having a stranger do my hair or my makeup. I am not spending a load of money to ride in a limo – I have a car for a reason. I am not spending a load of money to do something extreme afterwards. I am frugal, yeah, point?

It is almost all over…
Tonight will be lovely.

People and Their Kids

I work in a grocery store as a cashier. I see all kinds of people – some are extremely rude and others are the friendliest people out there.

Customers always tell me “Alright” when I ask how they are and when they ask how I am I always say “I am great.” I have one customer that always answers my question with “Oh I’m swell!” and when he asks me how I am, I say “I’m wonderful.” One day he said, “Oh yeah, how many times have you said that today.” So I told him he was the only customer I told that to because thats the way we are. He tells me he is swell and I tell him I am wonderful. It was that simple. He always comes to my register now and I have learned that the military told him he was retiring when he was 28 and that he has an 11 month old.

That is one of the friendly customers.

One day, I had just finished with a customer and a family was behind me at another register. The couple had three children. The oldest, a daughter, was standing in the middle of a lane behind her mother. The younger two, sons, were standing down the lane in front of the buggy with their father. The father was telling his daughter to come by him and she asked, “Why?” It was a simple question that could have been answered as, “Because you are in the way right there.” Of course he didn’t say that. Legitimately answering the question would have been too much of a problem obviously. Instead of giving her an answer he angrily said, “You do not need to ask me and your mom why on everything! We say to do things, you do them. You don’t need a reason.”

Exactly. Raise a child to not question anything. I do not care if that girl had been irritating him all day. Children ask why on a lot of things and it is important for them to do so. Telling a child to stop asking why is telling a child to stop exploring the world. Asking why as a child on simple subjects allows that child to grow into an adult that questions ideas and commands that don’t make sense. Complex ideas will not make sense to adults and the ones that will ask questions and find answers  will be the ones that didn’t have their dad yelling at them in the grocery store for asking questions.

That store gives me the opportunity to see a lot about people. It proves to be interesting.

People I Will Meet.

As more chances are given to me I will do what I can to have conversations and form relationships with people to understand the ideas of the rest of the world.

There are so many people with so many ways of expressing their thoughts. There are  rational types that can express their ideas and argue their opinions sensibly — these are the people I want to meet for I know too few. There are the people that shout out their views and will not listen to anything else because they do not want to feel wrong– these are the people I know and are hard to talk to.
I want to meet people that have learned to consider every point of a situation to form an opinion (or at least willing to reevaluate their ideas.) People cannot be taught how to truly form their own opinions. There aren’t a lot of people that really have their own opinions (at least not that I know), but more of people raised to think by the people around them. Not being fully sure if I am one that forms my own opinions or have been raised to think I form my own opinions, I like to think that I form my own ideas. People have to find how to form their own ideas.
Where I live, most people are taught what ideas to have and never find a way out of that teaching. Bringing up a controversial topic in class results in mostly the same ideas being voices. ex:

1. Abortion – “Wrong. Outlaw it.”
2. Pence Amendment – “Good! Put our money elsewhere!”

For those unfamiliar with the latter, I will summarize it in my own words (so it may be biased.)
The potential Pence Amendment would cut government funding for Planned Parenthood. It would stop funding for cancer screenings, birth control pills, and parts of WIC and a lot more. Cancer screenings being cut would prevent a lot of women from learning they have cancer early on. Cutting birth control would result in a lot more unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Cutting WIC would keep many children and pregnant woman from getting the required nutrition for a healthy lifestyle. I feel it would be a bad move.

I want to meet people that consider all sides of the story and can actually argue properly. These people that just have an opinion because they are trained to have it frustrate me. I am excited that I will face meeting new people soon and some will hopefully consider the way they think more often than the people I know now.