Journal 1-2: Bowling for Tradgedy

I. In last week's entry, I decided that I would research how children are affected by euphemisms and if people could find euphemisms in everyday life. I figured out that children are brought to accept and even use euphemisms frequently. A common euphemism in young children is discussing death. Such as "he's in eternal rest" or "he passed away" instead of just saying that they died. the reason we use these expressions in young children is because they don't always know how to quite process death. In simpler words, euphemisms are used by everyone to help young children understand better. Euphemisms are used to cover up the "bad stuff." As frr just average people having the ability to identify euphemisms, people know they are there and choose to use them. When it comes to discussing people, such as: instead of saying "she's a hooker" you may say "she's an escort." When people use euphemisms in this aspect, people are actually labeling others. All in all, euphemisms are the norm in society.






II. Over the past two weeks, our class has discussed fallacies, and we've been immersed in a movie called Bowling for Columbine which is a biased documentry created by Michael Moore. I learned that a fallacy is an invalid arguement. There are four different types of fallacies: fallacies of relevance, fallacies of presumption, fallacies of ambiguity, and fallacies of weak induction. Within each of these different types though, there are many different kinds. We learned about 22 different fallacies in all. After we learned about fallacies, we went into talking about the tradgedy at Columbine High School to prepare use for the documentry we were going to watch. The documentry Bowling for Columbine is extremely biased, and the amounts of video editing involved to make people agree with Moore's point of view is to the extreme.



In my personal opinion, I think that the class learning about how Moore edits his documentry is extremely important. One scene I remember is how he made Heston look like a complete jerk by editing his "speech" to Denver, Colorado when the NRA (National Rifle Association) came to speak. Moore had brought to different speeches together in order to make Heston seem incompassionate towards the Columbine shooting. Moore is the ultimate con-man when it comes to video. Although one positive that I got out of video was, amazingly enough, Marilyn Manson. Moore somehow made him seem as sane as you or I. Manson came off as a completely rational person, and then Mr. Couillard brought up Alice Cooper in class.

What I found so fascinating about Alice Cooper was the fact of how he has two completely different identities. On stage he's a death rock god, and behind the scenes he was a born again Christian. In my opinion, it was a completely rational explanation. He had to keep up his stage identity even though he thought completely different.

One thing that we did not discuss in greater detail is why people do the crazy things they do, like with the Columbine massacre. It happens everywhere. Such as in Blacksburg, when the tradgedy at Virginia Tech happened. While we were discussing the two boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I constantly kept thinking back to Seung-Hui Cho, who was the gunman at Virginia Tech. I know that in Bowling for Columbine Moore went into some detail of the gunmen's histories. But what I didn't understand was how nobody could really know what they were capable of until after the fact. Same with the boy at Tech, all the signs were there but, nobody would act on them.

III. What I would really like to research on a deeper level is the effects of bullying on a child. Is it a personal thing for how bullying can affect an individual or is it the same in everyone and it just depends on the extent of bullying? Where else have shootings taken place as a result of bullying?

Sources:

Retrieved from http://www.rockpic.net/images/alice-cooper-3.jpg

Wikipedia author. (2011, September 25). Virginia Tech Massacre. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirginiaTechMassacre

NIH Clinical Center. (2011). Partners in Research. Retrieved from http://cc.nih.gov/ccc/patient_education/pepubs/childhealth.pdf

Rascoff, Sally. (2009, March 2). The Social Significance of Euphemisms. Retrieved from http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2009/03/euphemisms.html