blog assignment 3

The Wave, by Morton Rhue

The book “The Wave” by the author Todd Strasser, alias Morton Rhue, published in the year 1981, is based on a true story which took place in the autumn of 1968 at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto, California.

The history class of Ben Ross, a young and driven history teacher, deals with the National Socialism and its consequences in history, when the question arises about how all this could happened and why no one raised their voice against it. He therefore decides to launch an experiment introducing rules and regulations of behaviour and appearance and group mottos like “strengh through discipline, strengh through community, strengh through power” for all his students, which have to be taken serious; and the project, in the end, nearly got out of control.

This experiment shows that by one person in authority giving a strong feeling of equality and community, adolescents or people in general can be easily led and follow the rules given. Through this phenomenon such occurrences can also grow into fascism.

Fascism is a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy and liberalism). Under a fascist regime, one has to obey the rules, the mindsets, and the believes of the leaders and nothing else will be accepted. Every member of such a group or party is equal to the other members of the community and if one member steps out of line, any other member is legitimated to use violence. In the book, the members are under constant control and it really seems that they have stopped thinking about being controlled. Moreover the pupils, and especially their teacher, stopped thinking about the consequences of the whole experiment.

I really can’t imagine that feelings of community or of equality can lead to losing individuality and to the ceasation of being independent-minded to such an extent. For some people, which we can call mavericks or social incompetents, these feelings could be completely new and may give them power and a kind of self- confidence.

In the book, the class nerd, Robert Billings, becomes a commendable and prestigious member of “The Wave” and in the end he is one of the most affected people because of the inevitable return to his old and discontented life.
The survival of the fittest or strongest is also a motto or a directive of fascism that moreover can lead to violence and crime. Another problem that usually goes hand in hand with fascim is racism and anti-Semitism.

The main goal we should reach is to remove such mindsets from the heads of all those people. The problem is that the majority of the members, in other words the clueless and innocent followers, do not even know what meanings of fascism, racism or anti-Semitism are. They just follow the words of their leader without knowing what is going on, and most important, why they are acting or thinking in these specific ways. All this doesn’t matter; all they want is honor from their leader and most of them like to show that he can trust in them, that they want to do everything that is asked of them, even committing a crime. But that doesn’t count due to the fact that violence is legitimatized and commonly accepted in these communities.

With the implementation of the experiment “The Wave” one can see that fascism is not only a historic event, especially one that took place during the Second World War, but also an event that could happen nowadays as well. We have to prevent this from happening as much as possible, making sure that it will never happen again.

assignment story of stuff

This short film ’The story of stuff’ from Annie Leonard tries to show and illustrate the lifecycle of stuff and how it affects us, the people and also the environment and in the whole, our world, how wasteful we all are and what everyone can do to avoid destroying our planet.

The main problem is that we all know about the environmental problems, the global warming, the CO2 emission, child labour and low-wage countries because we see it so often on TV, which is one thing no one can deny doing it, but we only care as long as we are directly confronted with these issues.

To start with shopping. We all like buying new and trendy stuff. Who is looking for the signs inside the shirt or jacket where is declared in which country it has been made? And if it is from China or Bangladesh who wouldn’t buy it because of this fact? I believe nearly no one of the customers, it only matters that it is cheap or on the contrary what label or brand the product is from.
Another fact is the boom of the low-cost airlines. Everyone prefers a cheap flight over an expensive if it is offered and one don’t require a good service.

The large corporations try to hold as much consumers as possible with low pricing because of their elastic demand in sectors of atomistic and/ or oligopolistic competition. To reach this they have to cut down their costs of extinction, production and distribution. But all this comes also back to the consumers who work for such large corporations with wage cuttings and longer lasting working hours.

It became so far, that a german producer of beer said in his advertisment: With buying a crate of beer you can save one square meter of rain forest in the Amazon. Is it possible? Can we only stop cutting trees with consuming more stuff? But it is quite positiv that such a corporation became anxious about the environment, realises that something has to be done and hopefully set the people thinking about the problem.

I don’t want to blame only the consumers, the companies are also not innocent. All of them try to increase their profit by increasing their revenues and decreasing their costs. Decreasing the costs of the product lead to materials which are not as sustainable as others and that has a direct impact on the persistence of the product. Instead of buying a new computer or coffee brewer every five years it becomes neccessary every two years which also increases the rate of consumption.

I think we have to become more aware of our environment and of our world. We have to change our whole attitude towards consumption but it will be a long and hard way because we are so used to the world and the way we live at the moment, the convenience, that we don’t see the neccessity of changing.

The issue of monitoring

In the contemporary society people are used to be monitored or they even don`t realize that all their steps are followed by cameras or satellites and how far the interception spread among us. Everyone leaves a trace wherever he might be or whatever he might do due to the fact that there are so many different possibilities to be tracked. We grew up with the longing for saftey within us all but in the last few years the whole issue got out of control.

Could it be the right way to give up liberty to receive safety?
As Benjamin Franklin said: ’Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

On one hand everyone has the right for privacy. The meaning of data privacy is, that every human should be able to choose personally who, when and in what extend the personal datas could be accessible. Nowadays, it is hard to say who haven`t got information about a specific person. But one can say that the individuals are not quite innocent to this issue, because everyone who uses Internet leave their data in form of a specific IP-address, as a fingerprint on every page they open that all other users are able to take a look at them. Mostely the users don`t realize due to the fact that they are not familiar with the handling and the consequenses it may take and that is and will be the main problem.

On the other hand can be questioned how far the interception is legal and don`t hurt the right for privacy. Is it really necessary to wiretap someones telephone talks, to locate cameras over a whole city, as it is practised in London, or to check the emails which are sent or received from private persons?

Monitoring at the working place is a big issue at the moment. With even the slightest evidence of ‘cheating’ at bosses which occure because of the perpatual interception of employees one is going to be fired. The companies pledge themselves that surveillance increase the efficiency of the workers and of the whole institution but it isn`t conducive to a good working environment which is necessary for motivated, satisfied and active employees.

To sum up surveillance in a certain extend could be helpful to prevent crime and terrorism and help to make the world a safer planet but too much isn`t that helpful and do more harm instead of giving a feeling of security for all the people.