The Big Bang

This week we watched crash. This movie utimitatly shows how people are affected when we act ethnocentric and are not sociological mindful.  We CRASH! When the movie finished its hard to remember that this only happened in  a time span of 2 days in only one city. Yet this movie can be applied to almost any setting and time. Because unfortunately "the crash" is still happening. At the youth group event i went to this weekend the theme was bullying. We talked about how to prevent it and stop it. Like our soc class everyone could recall when they were the bystander, the bully, and the victim.  One thing that they stressed is if we go home and share this knowledge about bullying that it would have a ripple effect and ulitmalty help to end bullying. However i disagree with this. I think as we talked about before that we are trained to assume things about people and stereotype. We get these ideas from the media, text books, family members and friends.  At Onward House i saw how a  6th graders science homework displays that. That it only showed white male scientist getting credit for the theories. When however there were others all over the world discovering the same things.  Also when we watched the video with the experiment of the dolls we saw how badly the media affects the self confidence of young boys and girls of color. When the girl was asked to tell which doll was the "bad doll" she pointed to the black doll. When asked then to say which doll looked most like her she struggled.  She knew she didn't look like the white doll but didn't want to be considered bad.  The stereotypes we create affect these children to adults who are watched while shopping just because they are of color.  So can we really end bullying? because to me it looks like society and the media bully. They train our minds to think these things.  So will one weekend at a youth group retreat end bullying? no. We have seen "the crash" from the time of the Romans where if you were not roman you were seen inferior. Now it is based on pigmentation of skin and religion. In thirty from now it might be based off something different but these stereotypes and discrimination which plays hand in hand with bullying. So maybe one youth group event can't end bullying across the world but hopefully it helped us "as jewish teens" to become more sociological mindful and less ethnocentric.