Memes and Whatnot

Here's me, chilling on my bed scrolling through TikTok like the lifeless person I am, and I stumble upon this:  https://vm.tiktok.com/H3wkPv/ . I highly recommend y'all watch this, if you don't this entire blog post will have no context. Claiming that I'm Hispanic, I mean this in no offense to Hispanic people, will help me get into college. After some researching, aka reading a Vox article on this, I stumbled upon this image:  To most people, the above infographic shouldn't come as a surprise. We all have the notion that race does in fact play a role in college admission, and this study by Princeton researchers proves it. Don't get me wrong, I think affirmative action is definitely a step in the right direction in the efforts of reducing de facto racism in America, however, I truly believe that there are better ways to be going about this. To address the issue of why do something other than affirmative action, the answer is quite simple: it doesn't work...

Years of high unemployment rates let to underemployment for those who were working, and this led to more unemployment for those who were not working. Gas prices were also incredibly high, regardless of the fact that oil prices were dropping. This then lead to high food prices and higher health care costs. You might be confused as to what this is about, this is about the unattainability of the American Dream. The American Dream relies upon a key concept that people can make enough money to get themselves out of whatever dire situation they are in and with enough hard work they are able to move up the socio-economic ladder. Well think again buckaroo. Here's a little graph comparing minimum wage to the GDP. What do you see? What I see is that our country is becoming more and more prosperous, which leads to increasing cost of living, but a minimum wage that isn't keeping up with this. We now live in a world where working minimum wage means that you are earning far less money t...

The Great Gatsby highlights the disparity between the upper and the lower classes of society. The disparity between classes is extremely visible in the United States. Poverty, the classic marker of the lower class is a constant, self-propagating cycle. We start the poverty cycle with a family in poverty. This family in poverty cannot afford to properly educate their children. These children continue their lives with sub-par education, which leads them to make sub-par decisions. They are more likely to choose not to pursue higher education, which then leads them to struggle to find jobs. Their inability to find jobs means they struggle to earn enough money to get out of the poverty threshold. They then start a family, which just continues the cycle of poverty over and over and over again. There is a couple of welfare programs that the government can instill to help alleviate the problem of poverty. Obviously, the easiest way to get people out of poverty is to simply provide them w...

Okay so you might be wondering what type of title that is, and in all fairness, I have no idea either. The title comes from my first reaction to reading on page 337 when Milkman "leaped". I personally thought what Milkman did was probably the stupidest thing he could've done. Yeah I get it Toni, you need to be all symbolic and come full circle, but come on, no one is that stupid.  On to the assigned part of this blog. If Vsauce existed back in the 60's, Guitar probably thought of the exact same thing I did. I can only imagine that he was extremely confused by Milkman's actions. I'm assuming everyone knows the saying "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight", Milkman was the type of guy to bring just himself to a gunfight. If Guitar could read what Morrison wrote about Milkman's leap, I think he'd also be confused by how a person could be "bright".  Again, I get it Ms. Morrison, symbolism, but c'mon he's an African ...