"Sunny was right...the working man IS a sucker"

In sociology class, we recently saw the movie "A Bronx Tale." In the movie, Coliginal, or "C", is a kid who grows up in the Bronx of New York. Growing up he has two role models in his life: His father, a city bus driver with good morals and working ethics, and Sunny, a widely feared gangster with golden street-smarts. He grows up listening to the two constant, contradicting life-teachings given to him between Sunny and His Father. He has equal love for both of them, but as he grows up, he listens more to Sunny's life-advice, and becomes closer to him.  A famous question that is asked in the movie is "Is it better to be loved or feared?" Sunny answers this question saying feared, because it lasts longer than love, and people sometimes take advantage of loved ones. Sunny turns out to be wrong, because as great as it seems to have respect from everyone out of fear,  when Sunny passes away,  no one still fears him, but C still loves him. All C's father had was a low-paying, mediocre job, and a clear conscience when he went to bed every night. But to C, Sunny had it all, the money, the "respect", the street-wisdom. As do most human beings,C wants all of this, but even Sunny didn't want C to have the same life as him. Most things aren't always as great as they seem to be. In life, people tend to reach for this idea of  power and respect. It ends up being a matter of patience; whether you want to get it right away, or your willing to wait and work for it. In my life, my dad always tells me that "You cannot build a house of bricks in one day." This meaning that if you want something or need to do something, there are plenty of ways of getting it done right away, but if you are willing to put for the extra time and effort, no matter how irritating or how time consuming, you will be able to have a clear conscience knowing that you will have a "strong, long lasting, and safe house built."

About Me

          The fact that this was the first topic that we were assigned to blog about in our sociology class and I'm just doing it now, 6 weeks into the class, would make me appear to most as the typical second-semester senior, who couldn't care less about the rest of his academic life in High School. This stereotype couldn't further contradict my true personality. Though I am 17 years old and a college-accepted, second-semester senior in High School, my attitude towards school is still that "What could a few more months of lessons in academics and life, before I go into the outside world, hurt?" Some traits that I have always had pride in portraying have been creativity, determination, tolerance & respect for others, and trustworthiness. My family consists of my mom Donna, my dad Evan, my older brother Jason, and my older sister Alexandra. I am Jewish, but like most other Jewish families in my town, I'm really not that religious.  My parents are divorced, which isn't a big part of my life, but it makes things interesting. I feel that I've experienced a lot of situations in my life so far, that have really led me to accept & understand all sorts of people, their lifestyles and their hardships. I like to snowboard, play football, wake-board, draw, play volleyball, listen to music, workout, chill and do fun stuff with my friends, and spend time with family. I had 3 dogs, my family recently had to send "mika" ( An American Staffshire Terrior, commonly known as a pitbull) back to the shelter earlier this year. So even though this is a delayed post from a second-semester senior, don't let it fool you, I've acquired an fine interest in sociology while being in this class, and plan on showing my true understanding of the cool stuff we learn in class with more "on-time" posts.

"Walk the Plank"

We recently did an activity in sociology class, in which we acted out roles of different individuals during a ship wreck. This experiment was based off a real event where the passengers on the sinking ship had to vote people off because only so many could fit on the life raft. So we went through the experiment, mostly voting of the annoying kids playing the roles rather than the actual idea of the person they were roll-playing. It was a cool little fun experiment. But what we didn't know, was that our teacher had done this experiment over 50 times and he kept records of the experiment's outcomes. After we finished, our teacher wrote the accumulated data over the years on the board. Over the 10 year period, the many different classes, with different people, who have never talked to each other, had very, very similar outcomes. The Data of the experiments showed that most of the time, the people voted off the life raft consisted of those who were either old, injured, handicapped, or of no use to the survival of everyone in the situation. So these people who could have had families, fascinating backgrounds, done brilliant, wonderful things in their lifetime were judged by their current outer appearance, and forced to "Walk the Plank" so to speak. This activity had me thinking about so many people that are withheld of their true potential just because of how they are portrayed. Their are so many people that could be of  great use in our lives, that we just ignore because they, at first, appear to be no "use" for us. In my own life, I have had teachers that at first I would have never taken seriously in a million years based off their looks or personality, but have taught me crucial life lessons, have helped me overcome hardships, and have really prepared me for the world. This lesson really highlighted the idea of Sociological Mindfulness, ( a lesson I already thought I understood), for me, and really further explained the several different angles of the concept. I really enjoyed this activity and lesson in life.