I saw two things last night that chafed my morale to a slight extent. One, a woman in Michigan was fired from her job for wearing her Halloween costume, which was of a Boston Marathon bombing victim. Two, Windows came out with this Windows Phone commercial attempting to imbue that such technology possesses the power to alleviate all problems in a classroom.
Both of these things, to me, indicate that our society is dominated by interests of corporations, and that a breach in Bill of Rights diction cannot even be alleged, since the government has sheepishly slinked into the corner of civic functionality.
Let’s start with the woman. Yahoo broke the news, thank you yahoo, with a story that features a picture of the woman looking happy, healthy and vital, in her costume she wore for one day.
In the article, the writer editorializes, which means interpolating one’s own opinion into an inherently non-opinion piece, referring to the “photo of her tasteless costume on twitter.” Here we see how mainstream press can tend to pillar the absolute power of companies to manhandle the lives of employees. I’m really not even sure why this is the case, but regardless, it seems that the corporate dollar has fully inundated and displaced the theoretical power of both our government and our culture.
The Windows Phone commercial will show why this is the case in the cultural area. To bring in a little real life swatch, I, yesterday in my Writing Poetry class, sat next to this lady as she read this “poem” that was actually a moribund death knell for her own enthusiasm for teaching. The rules about disciplining students have only gotten stricter, which certainly makes the increasingly competitive job market for lawyers an increasing topic of concern, but continually more and more emphasis is placed on test scores. For these reasons, was saying the teacher, actual classroom interaction and intellectual growth has been essentially suffocated. Anyway, her poem, and her discussion of it, really made me feel that teachers should be allowed to hit students with rulers.
Turn on the TV, though, and you get a different story! Not only is no light made of the current situation of schools in America, which involves bulbous class sizes and taut-thin budgets, not to mention the widespread attrition and calamity you see anywhere in America at large, but this impish cheese-ball actor actually has the nerve to tell us that these little devices will help kids achieve academic greatness. Ok, but what KIND of academic greatness? Filling in the correct bubble on a scantron?
One aspect of the teacher’s poem in my class was something like, telling the filing cabinet what happens when it talks back. I actually had a dream recently that I should become a computer. I was like, I’m going to go apply to be a computer at our university’s administration building. Think of all the verifiably correct tasks I could complete, from aptly profiling student ID numbers with like financial aid statuses, to successfully allocating funds for campus security. Then we’d have the most American damn campus in the country. Recently I found out how much these library cops make per hour. That explains SO much. Our president’s facial expressions are inscrutable. Our lives become more and more devoid everyday of communal civic hope and cultural artistic direction, yet people still cling to these phones like they’re baby’s bottles, and call for smaller government. How about an appointed bureaucrat designated to each precinct in America, and devoted to workers’ basic rights? Or did our forefathers sign that piece of paper for nothing?