Racial Tensions/ Discrimination

Well, I do not live in Springfield. To be honest, I grew up 20 minutes outside of Springfield just west of a small farming town of Williamsville, with a population density of 99.018 percent white. I didn't grow up with people of different races, just caucasian. Even though I grew up in a almost entirely white community, that doesn't I mean I have racial prejudices. People sterotype those who grow up in one ethnicity town and that they say terrible things about people of a different ethnicity. When I started working at the Illinois State Fairgrounds at the age of sixteen, that was my real first encounter with kids my age but of a different color. They kept to themselves, they were in their own circle. We worked together cleaning buildings, mowing the grounds, in preparation for the fair. I have been working there every summer since sixteen, and I have not witnessed anything that would be discrimatory. I keep to myself, I do not say anything insulting (actually, I usually don't say anything at all) when I am around others of a different ethnicity. The state is fulfilling its obligation by employing everyone that wants to be hired. They are not being discrimatory. Perhaps, I was brought up in an area that has this sort of thing happen or I just have not had the opportunity to go to larger cities that have these kinds of problems like gang violence. However, through my church I went to Chicago a couple of weeks ago and I attended a lecture on gang violence in Chicago, and how teenagers are being killed just because they wore the wrong kind of clothing. The lecture made me aware of a problem that is not just in Chicago but in other urban areas.

My thoughts on Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

What I thought was interesting other than the excessive use of drugs in the novel, was when Raul Duke aka Thompson was covering the National District Attorney's Convention on the drug issue. He couldn't help himself by being on drugs while attending the convention. He thought it would be necessary to represent the drug culture at the police convention. The drugs that he took were commonplace during the seventies. Contrastly, the cops that represented the major precincts in the country, were receiving various talks on drugs that were the rave back in the sixties. The cops were being told what drug users were using during the main stage of the Vietnam War (1961-1970) when the year is 1971 and the drugs on the street are much more stronger than the drugs used back in the sixties. The cops in this country knew nothing about the drug problem. They didn't know how to infiltrate the drug culture much less how to contain it.
I still percieve Las Vegas as the United States itself: money grubbing, wanting easy money, and Las Vegas is constantly tearing down its older what they deem obsolete, they rebuild a larger more expensive monstrosity on top of sand.

What is the American Dream?

What it has been in the past and will probably be successful. There is a varying degree of success in America. One example, a recent immigrant passed through the immigration process and setting up shop in a major city. He has made it to the United States safe and sound no matter the reason why he decided to emigrate from his country of origin. People want to come to the United States because they see themselves doing better in the states, rather than at their country of origin. Hope is idealism, it is not real. And to quote myself from our last lecture, it is idealism versus realism. The reality is that we sometimes fail, bad things happen, sicknesses and deaths occur in the family, a family loses their home due to their financial situation. It's hard, but we can succeed. As part of the American Dream, we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, try again, and try a different approach to succeed.
Hollywood has helped shape the American Dream. Due to them, we strive to become rich and famous and buy expensive stuff that makes us feel important. Well we can buy expensive stuff, we then have to wait for the bill to come in the mail, and then we wonder why they have to move out of their house when they had no way of purchasing the house in the first place. Again going back to Monday's lecture, we need to be smarter in the purchases we make. Will the things we buy last longer than the stuff that is more expensive. That is not the American Dream, spending out of our means. The parents will spend the rest of their lives paying back the credit card companies and will not retire till they are extremely old. Their children will continue to pay back their debt. The American Dream is about success and success varies to the individual.

The quintessential 21st Century American

I don't want to sound cynical but I have doubts about today's America and its citizens. I really hope that they are not as stupid as I think they are. I sometimes wonder if people know what we are doing to the planet, I mean the way we live and the developing countries are aspiring to become like us. Planet Earth does not have the resources to provide for everyone, especially the way we live and we represent a small portion of the world's population. It really seems like the planet Earth is infinite, but it is a farce. We like stuff. We build huge homes and fill them with stuff. We have this obsession of purchasing stuff. Most of the stuff we never touch again when we put it there, and when we do pick it up, we put it away to never see it again. We are so materialistic and we don't seem to care where the products that we use everyday come from and the environmental cost to where the products were produced. Recycling in this country is a joke because few people of our total population recycle and does little to benefit us and the rest of the world. We are taking baby steps in alternative fuels and energies when we should be taking giant leaps forward. We somehow have stalled. These energies are still in their infancy. It will take time to adjust, like we have done in the past. In the 30's and 40's, we used glass and metals and oil was only used for diesel and gasoline. It wasn't until the late 40s and 50s when scientists invented plastics and other uses. Now we use plastics in our everyday use. Now we need to take the next step further. That step being away from plastics and oil.