Local Organizations

In beginning my research for our next group project, I have come to the realization that Northfield is chalked-full of organizations! Between the town itself, Carleton College, and St. Olaf College, there are more than enough clubs for people to participate in. Learning this information reminded me of DeAne informing us earlier in the semester about a study of the hundreds organizations that were found in one Chicago neighborhood. She said that the people from the neighborhood were quick to ask the question "...And where is my organization?"... Needless to say, my group has had a parellel with our findings in Northfield and absolutely no problem finding service organizations. With both St. Olaf and Carleton boasting dozens of clubs/organizations despite their relatively small enrollment sizes, one begins to question if the excess of organizations in Northfield is unique or not for a "college town". For having only 20,000 residents, Northfield alone was lousy with organizations. Learning whether or not there are a higher number of organizations found (outside of the colleges) in "college towns" would be an interesting question. Does having a university/college in a town positively affect the number of organizations in that town? How does Northfield's number of clubs compare with other towns of similar size? Does the midwest contain generally more organizations than U.S. coastal regions?

Just another way to possibly prove Putnam wrong in his early 21st-century findings of the decline in volunteer organizations across America.

Welcome Back & Summer Plans

As we begin to ease back into our normal AmCon routine after a much needed break, I've been learning more about what my friends at Olaf will be doing this summer. I know that some will be spending it in Northfield, taking additional summer classes, and others will be traveling or returning back home to work jobs at places such as summer camps or restaurants. I'm excited that my job for this summer will be a hands-on experience with many of the things that we've talked about this year in AmCon. At the start of spring break, I learned that I will have a full-summer internship with my own district's Kansas Congresswoman. I hope that I will be able to gather a better understanding of both the government's role and how democracy works. Is there anyone else in our class who might be working in politics as well this summer?

What's On My Mind

SPRING BREAK?!

I Loathe Group Projects

This is going to be an opinionated piece.

I'm not sure what I think of this AmCon assignment. On one hand, it's very clear in its intentions and I (for the most part) understand exactly what we're supposed to be doing. I like the idea of using a précis and I like the subject of Putnam's Bowling Alone. On the other hand, it's a group project. Group projects are probably not my favorite: several people writing together is not easy. We all have different styles of writing and don't even know each others' style. Writing becomes particularly difficult when it's nearly impossible to maintain an equality of work for each person and some people are just generally a lot more busy than others. Also, it's midterms week for most students. This means that someone who is totally stressed out over his/her chem or math or (fill-in-the-blank) test(s), is more likely to devote less time to this project and more time to the exam that will affect his entire grade drastically. Therefore, everyone in this person's group has to put in more effort to makeup for his/her slack.

I realize that this problem might not be the case for every group, but I do know that not everyone likes group projects. Yes, it's a different style of writing and an opportunity to work with our fellow classmates... but I find it extremely difficult to rely on several other people for a part of my personal grade.

Fischer's Response to Putnam

I'm currently reading Claude S. Fischer's (from the University of California-Berkeley) response to Putnam's Bowling Alone essay. What I enjoy about her response is that many of her points align with the points brought up in class on Friday. One of those points was brought up by Jack when we discussed whether or not watching sports is a form of "social capital". Certainly in the U.S., sports are a huge part of our culture, but does that make them social capital or not? Some of us argued that they are not social capital because they are typically watched at home, with people that you've probably met before. Others argued that it does generate social capital because of places such as sports bars, where fans who've never met each other come together and watch a game (an example of "bridging"). Personally, I consider the latter to definitely be a form of social capital. The question is whether or not that act has increased within the past 60 years or not. As Fischer points out and our class forgot to mention, the act of attending athletic events has increased significantly within the past 60 years. This is a definite form of social capital. Fischer sites the increase in social capital through sports as one of the faults of Putnam's essay. Putnam does not recognize this increase in his essay, but I'm glad that we as a class made the effort to debunk some of Putnam's "statistics" through common knowledge of our own American culture.

Ways to Help Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Victims

When we're at St. Olaf, I know that it's easy for me to forget about the things that are happening outside of our little bubble known as "the hill". Most of us never watch TV, and only some read the newspaper. But as most of us are probably aware, Japan experienced its largest ever recorded earthquake at a 8.9 on the Richter scale. Hundreds of people are either missing or dead, and there has been enormous destruction. Luckily, there are ways that anyone from around the world can assist this situation. I found an article through TIME Magazine listing 6 different ways that a person can help the victims of Japan's earthquake and tsunami.

Copy and Paste into your search bar:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/11/five-ways-you-can-help-earthquake-and-tsunami-victims-in-japan/

Bowling Alleys and Leagues

DeAne and Chris spoke a little today about what really made Putnam's article a great one was using the example of bowling leagues in America. DeAne's story about her Great-Uncle(?) having an inscription on a bowling alley table after his death and the bowling alley being used as the place for the funeral reception was certainly interesting. Hearing her talk about bowling leagues prevalence in America is something that I can relate to as well. I'll share a few bowling stories of my own here~

Growing up, I never knew much about my great-grandparents on either side of my family. They had all passed away before any of my siblings or me were born, but the one fact that I remember learning about my mom's grandparents is that they were part of a bowling league. The only real story that I know about my great-grandma Wendt is that she bowled a 200 when she was 80 years old and get her name and picture in the Salina Journal during the 1960's. Keep in mind that this is in a small 100 person town in the middle of Kansas. When my mom told me these things about my great-grandparents I remember that I didn't really understand what a bowling league was. "People used to have bowling leagues where they would get together with neighbors and go bowling for fun," she would say. Used to have bowling leagues... This definitely rings true for Putnam's essay. People just don't go bowling like that anymore, and I guess I never used to question why that is significant or why that trend ended.

My second story is about the bowling alley in my hometown. My town of 3,000 people used to have a bowling alley. I vaguely remember it from when I was just a girl. It probably contained about five lanes, was dark and sold a lot of beer. In 2001 after the bowling alley had been closed for around four years, the bowling alley collapsed suddenly and ruined two vehicles. The brick building was around 70 years old. Although this was a complete surprise to everyone, I think that the biggest disappointment was knowing that the possibility of having a bowling alley ever again (or at least during my childhood) would be taken away. For several years after, people talked about and tried to put in another bowling alley but it never went through. The fact is, with no bowling leagues or major community connections to bowling in my town nor a voluntary association to promote a new bowling alley, there was never another bowling alley put into my town.

Bowling Alone

Putnam's article is one of my favorite articles that we've read so far this semester. I felt that he used historical evidence and studies in a way that was clearly communicated to his audience. One question of the article was basically the question of, "Why is America now bowling alone?" Putnam attempts to tackle this question in the latter half of his essay where he uses statistics to prove a point. Certainly, as Putnam has said, I believe that women's rise in the workforce has contributed to part of the decline in social involvement. Although Putnam uses this information to show that women's rise in the workforce is just a small contribution to the underlying problem of the lack of civic involvement, I think that it has contributed more significantly.

I remember watching a video in my Sociology class during my senior year about the impacts of women joining the workforce. Women joining the workforce had such a dramatic effect on the economy and the social roles of both men and women. Because women began to work, their wages started significantly lower than men's wages because there was not enough money to distribute- on the other hand, men's wages lowered to meet women's. Slowly, over time, both sexes have had less of a salary gap between them. The negative aspect of this is that the "real salary" in "real money" of men 50 years ago is around the same amount of both men AND women's combined salaries today. This means that both sexes have had to devote many, many more hours to their jobs. I believe that this strong devotion and focus of money in the United States has greatly affected the average American's priorities. Americans are overall more concerned with debt and money and don't seem to really have time anymore for civic organizations.

I think that the average American cares about who gets elected in their politics and is constantly seeing information about candidates via television, news or internet... But, Americans devote less time to civic responsibilities because they simply don't see them as their first priority. Americans may not realize it now, but as Putnam said, their is a positive correlation between civic organizations and political involvement in the United States. Hopefully the economy will be able to support the rise of minorities in the workforce without having our political involvement suffer.

America #1 No More?

I just finished reading a really interesting article from Time Magazine online. Title of the article: "Are America's Best Days Behind Us?" I strongly recommend anyone from our class to read all of most of the article because although much of our class is spent talking about America in the past, America today is very important for how we use the information we will learn from this class to better ourselves and society in the future.

The gist of the article is the fear of the U.S. not remaining "Number 1" anymore and what our government and people can do to help. It is written by a legal immigrant and speaks of the many problems with our government AND the solutions. The article even references back to the Founding Fathers.

Quote from the columnist: "America's success has made it sclerotic. We have sat on top of the world for almost a century, and our repeated economic, political and military victories have made us quite sure that we are destined to be No. 1 forever. We have some advantages. Size matters: when crises come, they do not overwhelm a country as big as the U.S. When the financial crisis hit nations such as Greece and Ireland, it dwarfed them. In the U.S., the problems occurred within the context of a $15 trillion economy and in a country that still has the trust of the world. Over the past three years, in the wake of the financial crisis, U.S. borrowing costs have gone down, not up."

Please copy and paste into your search bar, and read the full article here!: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2056610-1,00.html

Bipartisanship?

Today we ended our class period by basically talking about the effectiveness, or non-effectiveness, of bipartisanships. There were many students in our class who believed that having a bipartisanship in America is not the best for our country and proposed that we have other systems such as centralized government, parliament, or a three political parties. Listening to all of this made me realize how vast of opinions my classmates have when it comes to politics and government, and reconsider my own predisposition of bipartisanship obviously being the best for the U.S... There are some things that I think work well in bipartisanships though.
1.) As other students such as Petra said, I like being able to know that even when I'm in the minority, I'm not really in the minority because it's usually about 50-50.
2.) This knowledge lends itself to me believing that every election I might have a chance for the party I'm supporting to win.
3.) Bipartisanship originally means the chance for the opponents to work together after a government is formed... I guess sometimes number three is forgotten and we may feel as if they are "screaming at each other" as one student mentioned today.

So we may, as a class, agree to disagree on this subject.. but that's okay. It's what democracy is all about. To me, the benefit of having a two-party system is mainly that Americans can feel as though their votes will be valuable in election where the odds are 1:1 and not 1:3 or more.

Kid Politics

One thing that we've talked about in successfully creating a democracy is forming habits. De Tocqueville said that this is essential in creating a lasting democracy, and I completely agree. In America, democracy is habit. From a young age, we're taught that democracies make decisions whether its on the playground or in the classroom. This is crucial in America because at a very young age, residents learn how our government system works in a broad sense.

All of this talk of children and democracy in America reminded me of a great podcast I listened to a few weeks ago on the ride home during Interim break. This American Life has a great weekly podcast (for free!) on iTunes that tells interesting stories in a unique manner. One of the episodes I listened to was called "Kid Politics"-- you can read about and listen to that story here by clicking on Play Episode: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/424/kid-politics

There are stories of kids learning about how to make presidential decisions at different Presidential libraries and acting as a true government. Although teachers do these sort of field trips to celebrate occasions such as President's Day or Lincoln Memorial Day, I now see that the learning experience gained is a good reflection of the habit of democracy that still exists in our country today.