But That's What I Think

In my first week of college, I had the privilege of listening to Doctor Richard Haas, an American diplomat who's worked in government and is now president of the Council for Foreign Relations. He is determined to open understanding about foreign relations to Americans, so the world can be better understood in this period of turmoil. His main point during his opening speech was that for the last several decades we have been in a relative time of peace. Since World War II the world has been more peaceful than it had been before that. And in the last decade that peace has been disturbed. It also happens that in the last decade the politicians of our time have shifted the popular worldview. Not from others to ourselves, in some sense we have always been worried about ourselves just in a more peaceful way, but in a timeline sense. The world can be thought of in two ways. One is that we are just one part of a longstanding system that should continue on for generations to come, and th...

Net Neutrality is already gone (technically). In December of 2017, the Federal Communications Committee (the FCC) votes on whether net neutrality, a system that keeps internet providers from charging for certain types of internet data, should stay. The vote was 3-2 against keeping it, and net neutrality was officially repealed. However, Congress has gathered enough votes to hold a Congressional Review, which allows the government to overturn decisions by federal agencies (like the FCC). This vote is to be held sometime this week before companies can start to change their payment systems on June 11th of this year (when net neutrality is officially out the window). In the capitalist point of view, this is a good thing. More money is circulating and companies are receiving money and buying things, however from a different standpoint net neutrality could just about destroy the socioeconomic system. The American education system already has a huge gap between the education of people w...

In the wake of the 18th mass shooting this year in America, which came less than two months after 2018 began, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, chose to stand up for every child who's ever endured a school shooting just one day after they watched and listened to their friends and teachers being shot. And it wasn't politicians or people in power who stood behind them, it was students just like them who realize, every time a school shooting hits the news, that there won't be change until we make it. The day after the shooting, a friend and I were talking about what we would do if we were in a school shooting. What escape routes we had in a classroom with just one door to exit from that locks from the outside. We considered jumping out a window, but where would we go from there? The woods? The highway? Then it occurred to us that it's not something we should ever have to worry about, yet we do. Every year another school shooting puts us on our toes, ...

This was originally written as a social commentary piece for my Creative Writing class. Humans like to think that they are invincible, but as we continue to expand our technological abilities and the space we take in the universe, we will start to face problems we have never faced before. Despite humanity being decades from space travel being a common luxury, we are already facing problems that we can not seem to control. The biggest of these issues is population growth. The global population growth rate has been going down over the last twenty years, but the amount of people on Earth has just about doubled in that time(Roser, Ortiz-Ospina I1). This is possible because although fewer people are having children, they are living longer due to technological leaps made over the last fifty years. In a broad term, technology has been growing exponentially since the invention of electricity, but the succession between new types of tech has rapidly gone from years to weeks since the creat...