Four More Years (of War)

Today in English class we watched a portion of the most recent Republican presidential debate. I must say, as a whole, the next four years are looking pretty bleak if any of those candidates are elected president. Before I get too ranty, let me share an awesome gif of John Kasich playing Fruit Ninja.

Now we know what John Kasich was doing with his hands during the debate. https://t.co/U6izaJyCVD pic.twitter.com/Nq5L0f3JZn

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 17, 2015

Now that you’ve laughed at one of the candidates’ hands, time to fear for your life at everything that comes out of their mouths. First, and dumbest, of all is Donald Trump. All I can say about him is that if he is elected president, I am putting the odds at about 50% that we will all be nuked off the face of the earth before I can graduate college (on the bright side, I won’t have to pay back student loans). The only other thing I will say is that the only thing that is scarier than his ideas, is the fact that 40% of the Republican party supports his ideas. Now time for another quick gif to help forget that terrifying fact.

via GIPHY

The rest of the candidates are potentially even more harmful than Trump because they are actually creating policy out of their crazy ideas and their ideas are no less insane, or illogical, than Trump’s. My favorite was Ted Cruz’s call for “targeted carpet bombing” of ISIS. Carpet bombing, by definition, is not targeted, it is designed to destroy large areas, and “targeted carpet bombing” would then just be bombing, which is no different from what we are doing right now. There were also plenty of misleading statements and outright lies, like that George Bush deported 10 million illegal immigrants while in office. 10 million is the total number of  people who were turned away at the border for various reasons during that time, a vastly different thing than deportation. The other repeated mistruth is that our military is shrinking. Yes, we do have less ships than before, but the ships are much larger and more advanced. An aircraft carrier does not equal a tiny destroyer. We also do not have as many active troops, but there are no more open battlefields and we have unmanned technology like drones replacing human jobs. Alas, I do not have enough time to debunk every lie that was said, but if there is one thing to take away it is that we are in for a rough four years (if we don’t get nuked first).

Stamping Envelopes

For all high school seniors, this is a busy time of year. There are college applications to still finish and you finally start to hear back from early action schools. There are a lot of tests and projects that need to be crammed in before Christmas break. There is procrastination to be done because it's almost the holidays and you don’t want to do any of that stuff. I know that I have been extremely busy and will only get busier for the next few weeks. That’s why I was very intrigued at something I did yesterday.

Every Wednesday I volunteer at the library, sometimes helping people and sometimes doing odd jobs. Yesterday, I was given the task of stamping return addresses on a box of 500 envelopes. I know that most of you reading this right now are probably thinking that sounds terrible and it sort of was miserable, but at the same time I kind of enjoyed it. I am so used to doing a million things at once and my mind being all over the place, so stamping envelopes was an interesting change because it required absolutely no brain activity. As menial and boring as stamping envelopes sounds and is, it is also very relaxing. It enabled me to just not have to think about anything for an hour. It was also kind of nice because with all of the stuff we have to do as seniors, it often feels like we never make any progress, but I got to literally watch a giant pile of stuff to do turn into a pile of completed things. It felt very satisfying to actually feel like I accomplished something. Does anyone else find menial tasks like stamping envelopes relaxing?

Maternity and Paternity Leave

In English this week, we have been reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, a (very, very long) essay about the patriarchy in early 20th century society. Along with analyzing the book, we have been spending a lot of time talking about effects of the patriarchy in our society. One topic we spent a lot of time talking about was maternity leave. I was surprised to learn that the school does not offer paid maternity leave. I knew that it was not required by law and that teachers only got two months, but I always figured it was paid. I thought that mostly only entry level jobs did not pay maternity leave, but the school does the bare minimum as well.

I was also surprised to learn that the school offers absolutely no form of paternity leave at all and that teachers cannot even use their sick days because the school requires a doctor’s note if they are out for more than 4 days in a row. This is almost worse than the school’s policy on maternity leave because teachers could be fired for taking just one week off when their children are born. How are they supposed to spend any time with their kids if they have to return to work immediately? I think that there should be at least 3 to 4 weeks of paternity leave even if it is unpaid. Plenty of countries do offer paternity leave and the US offers one of the least amounts of paternity or maternity leave out of developed countries. For example Norway offers 35-45 weeks of maternity leave at at least 80% pay and 14 weeks of paternity leave at at least 80% pay. If America offered even half of that, it would be more than double what we currently have and would be at least mostly paid.