Shift Happens

Social change refers to any substantial changes over time in behavior patterns and cultural values and norms. It is the facts, sometimes unpleasant facts that we cannot stop.it is look like a baby that we love the most and that baby must grew and one day will move outside the house. Watching the video makes person sad in one side and happy in the other side. It makes you happy when you see how technology is growing in the world is going forward. Also it makes you sad because it one age does not support that grew. For instance I am happy because I am student and probably I will get better future, but when you see all what you learned will outdated even before I graduate.

Stopping or reducing the bad side of the story is in the hand of educational system. Educational system must prepare students for future. We might ask; how I should predict what kind of change will happen in future? The answer is let us looking into human’s dream. Human always think of all possible changes and we must integrate those possible changes into our school system to be studied.

A change in information processing and availability is the best happened in human’s life. I would like to tell one story to show how great those changes are. Last year we had a group project as a last assignment. The professor asked five students to write one research papers. I divided the project among us via email and each student was doing his/ her portion. One of student was communicating with me all the time at the end she told me that she is visiting her relatives and sending me her papers from Pakistan. This is a small example how great it is the changes happened in information processing. There might have some drawbacks but the benefits are exceeding those drawbacks.

There are many ideas that we have studied throughout the class that can help to better understand the fact in that video. For example; globalization, changing culture, and mobilization are the best to describe the facts in that video. Globalization made information flow easier among nations and ideas can be exchanged faster among people.  Globalization made people adopt new culture and learn new life patterns.

Life in city vs. rural area

Living in small city in Iraq and moving to Virginia in United States is similar to moving from rural city in American to Virginia. The differences between the two put me in cultural shock for almost six months. Talking about differences does not mean only in size but in every aspects of the life. The most important differences I would like to discuss in the paper is; in term of social, health, and economic.

I bought my in Virginia in April 2008, and I live there since then, but until this moment I do not know even the name of the person who lives next door. One week ago there are couples living in the house on the right hand sight of my house, passed by my house while I was working in the front yard and they told me “HI”. That was the first time someone greeting me at that neighborhood. Compared with where I lived, I knew every single family and their kids not only in our block but also three blocks away from my house in each direction. If someone in the neighborhood was getting sick, other people went and visit him and they share happy and sad moments together.

Since 2005 when first time I come to American until this moment, I have been hospitalized 6 times, and I must visit family doctor every six month. I left Iraq and I am 35 years old, I never went to hospital, I never been ill. Many times I argue with my friends about this particular subject. Simply in the United State food and drink is processed nothing is natural, while in Iraq I remember the guy we used to by vegetables from him, he own that farm and he was selling everything from his farm, they were natural. Another point about health was, we never had transportation, and we used to walk that was a good sport. In the US we do not walk, use our car to go even for short distances.

The last point I would like to talk about is economic. Many times my friends asking me if I missed my old life, honestly I say: NO. Economic was very bad in small cities, we was living excluding every kind of entertainments from our life to survive. People in small city, keep one job and stick with it until they retire because finding another job is really hard. There is more prosperity in big city and it is easy to find a new job.

There are many differences between life in rural area and big cities. It is hard to say which one is better, because each has it is own flavor. However, we can compare the two in term of social, health, and economically.

Who wields the power in our democracy?

       This is very tricky question, First in the assignment consist of two different words: weilds and wields. I am not sure which one is the target! I assume wield is the correct word. In democracy system one person cannot wield power because it will turn the democracy into dictatorship just like Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That guy used to say “whatever I write on piece of paper, it is low.” However, as Max Webber mentioned millions of people cannot meet to make a political decisions, there must be certain people whom are experts and been elected by people to make those decisions, those people together wield power. Even those people they cannot make arbitrary decision because there is a balance of power and low to stop them.     

        The elected group of people make up political parties and they make what they believe is right, count. In the United States there are two groups or political powers they run the show. Any decision has to pass congress which consist of 100 members and parliament which has 435 members. This how the democracy system works, they do not allow person has a super power.   

       Many of us remember that the President Bill Clinton represented in the court because he was accused scandal. Even though he was a President of the country, he did not have that power to do what he wants. So, since everyone has to follow the low, no one actually wields the power.   

          I strongly believe that Pluralist theory is the most effective for few reasons. First, citizens cannot have direct influence on any political decision. Politic is very complicated matter, it is require a lot of expertise, people common people must not allow to influence any political decisions. Another great point is, no one wields power in the country because presence of interest group limits the centralization of power in the hand of government official.

Classmates, Professor: I would like to invite you to see a short clip degree to show you to what degree people do not understand politic in this country:

                      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVz4VweMqFE