Hobophobia

This graph, off of a post on the Sociological Images blog on the Society Pages, is the main message of the Occupy Wall Street protesters and the inspiration for today's post. When they say, "we are the 99%", they're referring to the minuscule 1% of the population that controls about 40% of the nation's wealth. But regardless of whether you agree with the Occupy movement, there is no denying the facts of wealth inequality. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.

This raises the greater issue of how people relate to those in lower socio-economic situations; generally, those with less money are pitied, or else seen as dependent on the wealth of the upper classes and treated with the same paternalistic attitude as the one embodied by imperial America in the early 1900s. But what especially interests me is how virtually the entire country, not just the richest 5%, treats those with nearly no money and nowhere to live: the homeless.

Because I'm writing a piece on the issue for my Speech team in my high school, I've been doing a lot of research into the plight and treatment of the homeless today. What I have found is shocking: people think the homeless are lazy, stupid, mentally ill, or addicted to drugs, otherwise they would have dusted themselves off and gotten a job already. Otherwise, they are considered as simple children in need of a parental hand to guide them to the enlightened realm of home-ownership. Even worse, especially since the early 2000s, the amount of violence against the homeless has shot up, with hundreds being brutally murdered without reason since 2006.

Yet the face of homelessness has changed drastically since 2008; with the economic downfall, more and more ordinary people find themselves without economic means to pay for their homes, moving into temporary or charity housing in order to get by. These are families with children in schools and hardworking individuals with jobs, currently homeless, but fitting none of the stereotypes of a dirty old man with a beard and a coat.

To discover the reason behind the relationship between the homeless and everyone else, we must look to the human tendency to project the situations we experience onto our own lives; as we encounter someone living under newspapers, we are subconsciously aware of how little separates them from us. All they'd need is a house and they could be our neighbor, or maybe even a member of our family. This painful awareness is what makes us so uncomfortable when we see someone sitting on a street corner with a sign asking for food, and this discomfort is implemented differently in everyone: as fear, as disgust, as sadness, as sympathy, or even as violence.

The Help vs. District 9

I’m a big movie fan; I’ll pretty much watch any genre and enjoy something about the movie. I recently plumbed the depths of HBO and came across a movie I always wanted to see in theaters but never got the chance: District 9, a film symbolically about aliens, set in Johannesburg with ties to apartheid South Africa. It was fantastic. Then about a week afterwards, I went to see The Help, a new movie about maids in Jim Crow Jackson, MS that got great reviews from my parents and friends, and it was also excellent.

For some reason, when I think about either film, the other always pops into my head, so I've decided to compare and contrast these two movies together to see why that might be. The Help vs. District 9, a showdown of less-than-epic proportions. I have race and racism on the brain because we’re reading The Poisonwood Bible in English class and both of these movies have an interpersonal-racism theme, so it seems appropriate.

Similarities:

1. Both used most white characters as “bad guys”, and even some of the white characters that were supposed to be “good guys” had character flaws that made them less appealing to the audience. In District, Wikus Van De Merwe (the main character) was dangerously racist, despite his views being tested as he slowly turned into the race he oppressed. In Help, Celia Foote was a sweetheart and had the best of intentions, but her speech was annoyingly squeaky and she acted without thinking, getting drunk at a party and making a fool of herself.

2. Both narrowed in and focused on a few members of the protagonist race, using Minny and Aibileen in Help and two nameless “Prawns” (a crude name for the alien race, pictured below) in District. This built a connection between those few characters and the audience so that the viewers wished them the best by the end of the film.

3. Both films utilized the strong feelings that go with history to their advantage: Americans often still feel shame at the behavior of their parents and grandparents in the beginning of the civil rights movement, and I've talked to a South African friend who says his country still regrets apartheid. Choosing to set the movies with direct and indirect connections to these times added symbolism and an answer to “who cares?”

Differences:

1. The most shocking and important difference between these movies is the level of symbolism: while Help used actual black actresses to play African American maids, District turned the blacks in South Africa into a race of aliens that, thirty years after their arrival, were

thrown into a ghetto and oppressed. Not only were they clearly not human, but they were repulsive looking. In short, when watching The Help, the audience saw the characters as they were in real life. But in District 9, we saw the blacks as disgusting, inhuman creatures, exactly how they might have looked through the eyes of a racist South African at the time. The symbolism other-ized the Prawns to enhance the movie.

2. Another important difference was the violence level of the movies. While The Help was poignant in its own way, it focused on a war of words as the main character Skeeter wrote her exposé on the plight of the Jackson maid. In District 9, the filmmakers chose a more drastic approach as the Multi-National United company used Wikus’ alien arm to murder innocent Prawns with their own weapons, as an example. I haven’t yet decided which approach was better, if one was at all. I’m not convinced there is a definitive answer to that question.

If you’ve seen these movies, do you agree? Disagree? Let me know!

The Post-Apple World

Hello blogosphere! We all know that Steve Jobs just died. It’s everywhere and it’s a big deal. The end of an era. Instead of writing directly about him, my post is inspired by his legacy: the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad, and all the other competing technology he brought about indirectly.

It’s often talked about, that my generation is losing the ability to communicate interpersonally, that we spend all of our time staring at the little screen of our phones and not enough time really seeing the world around us. Our brains move at technology speed so we don’t have time for real human relationships; we turn to Tumblr, we turn to twitter, we live vicariously online before even trying to live in real life. We come out of the womb wearing earbuds and flicking our parents the middle finger. And to complicate the issue, we start revolutions through facebook and we change the world without even having to talk face to face.

Up until about a week ago, I thought this was just a huge over-generalization. Sure, there’s some truth there, some people are like that, but look at me! I only use my phone to text and make calls. I only have one iThing. I hardly ever buy products online. I hang out with friends in person. I’m on the speech team so I know how to communicate without saying the word “like”. Ding ding ding, here I am, the exception to the rule! But I was wrong.

I went with my mom to a store called Akira, where employees work on commission, to look for a homecoming dress. As soon as we walked in, we were greeted by a young salesperson named Julia. She started asking me questions about the dance and I was a little taken aback by her boldness, but I answered her inquiries, hoping she’d leave me to shop. But Julia did not—she’d give me about 10 minutes to look around and pull a few things, then run over to ask if she could add them to my dressing room. In my head, I thought, why can’t I just hold onto them and pick my own dressing room when I’m ready? Out loud, I said, “Uhhhh sure” (eloquent, no?). It didn’t stop there. Julia meandered by every time I came out, complimenting the dress I had on, making accessory suggestions. Just being a general bother.

In my mom’s generation, friendly salespeople were welcomed, even expected. Piling on compliments, making sure shoppers were comfortable, it was all part of what made a good salesperson. For me, I usually get in, find what I want, and get out, without ever having to speak to anyone. I’ve lost the notion of the shopper-salesperson relationship. And this is only the beginning of the relationships I’ve lost. I’m afraid that all the accusations mentioned a few paragraphs above are true, but they’re not attributable to owning the technology anymore. You don’t have to have an iPad to think in iPad speeds, you don’t have to have a facebook to feel more comfortable expressing yourself with the anonymity of the internet. It seems that no one growing up in this time is immune, not even me.

But this brings up the curious question of whether this change in the way we communicate, thus relate to others, is cause to regret the times of our parents. Is it okay that we communicate differently? Should we even bother criticizing the modern mindset and technology dependence? From close up, it seems like important values are being lost, but if we step back, are we just going through a normal historical change? Can the post-Apple world be equated with the post-automobile world or the post-Cold War world?

I’d appreciate any thoughts or comments from people of all ages. This is not an issue that can be addressed by one generation.