THE DEBATE ON ABORTION

After reading facts from both sides of the abortion argument I have to side with prochoice.
It's clear that the debate goes beyond just facts because both sides argued "facts" that contradict each other. According to NARAL, abortion can be safe and harmless. According to NRLC, abortion is dangerous and harmful. To make an educated decision on the moroality and legality of abortion, you have to look at the facts on both sides and make a decision on what makes more sense. The way I see it, is people are so attached to this issue that you cannot really change someone's mind one way or another. Therefore the best option would be letting them choose for themselves if they want an abortion or not. PRO CHOICE would be the solution. It makes perfect sense. In a democracy one opinion is not pushed onto everyone and one religion is not pushed onto everyone. Each American gets to choose what religion they want to follow or not to follow any religion. Logically, abortion should be treated the same way.
Legally, I guess I can see why parents would have to consent to thier child's decision to have an abortion. You can argue that a child still owns their body, but then children should be able to get tatoos, piercings, plastic surgency, and other major life altering procedures done at a young age. Personally though I don't think it should be necesarry. The reason consent is needed for most of the medical procedures above it because teens don't have fully developed frontal lobes and therefore need thier parents to guide thier important decisions. However with this information, a teen without a frontal lobe is less likely to be able to manage raising an infant and giving it the amount of care it needs. Having an abortion would allow that teen to continue growing and developing so that later in thier life they can have and raise a baby without the stress of being a teenager. I think if a daughter wants to go to a clinic and have it done, they should be able to. I also understand though why a law would be made  to make sure parental consent if present.
A father should have to be notified about the abortion. The father should not get to have a say in the abortion though. It's the woman's body, not the man's. Since it is the man's DNA in the fetus, it should get to know if it is being aborted.

PIZZA IS NOT A VEGETABLE

So, the latest news in politics is that congress is trying to pass legislation that pizza is a vegetable and counter Obama's legislation in trying to make school cafeteria food healthier. The sad truth is that childhood obesity has tripled in the past 3 decades and I'm sure some of it is tributed to kids counting the tomato paste on thier pizza as a healthy food choice. Obama's legislation was trying to benefit  youth in our society by giving kids at least one nutritional meal a day. So how and more importantly why is congress (the GOP) trying to investigate the definition of a vegetable and include pizza in that category? Corporations. Corporations. Corporations. Money. Corporations. The frozen pizza industry bribes legislators and obviously has a greater influence (more money) than the kids in our society. This shows just how powerful the corporations are and how they use their power. It shows how our elected politicians prioritize money over the health and common good of its people. The people with money (corporations) control our laws. Is this a democracy? No wonder streets around the world are being occupied with people trying to change these ways and limit the power of corporations. If you want to fight for the belief that pizza is not a vegetable sign this petition. 
"School lunches are hard to change -- and it doesn't take a doozy like 'pizza is a vegetable' to know that the corporate interests have more money and more Washington lobbyists than kids do. That's why pizza was classified as a vegetable during the Bush years. The Obama administration made that common-sense change, but the Republican Congress wants to take us back to the money-for-influence status quo." (Democrats.org)
It's time to start putting real people's needs before corporations' needs. America get your priorities straight starting with choosing real vegetables over pizza. I wouldn't be surprised if my generation was the first to not outlive our parents' generation.

Death Penalty Over in Illinois

The abolishment of the death penalty in Illinois was just. The decision was not based on opinion, but on facts. Even if you are for the concept of a death penalty, you should still agree with Illinois's reasoning behind abolishing it. Before the death penalty was abolished, its existence was not serving its purpose. Its goal is providing justice by killing those who murdered, was not what was happening in the state. The same reasoning was used by Gov. Ryan in 2003 when he decided to commute all persons on death row. Ryan talked about the 17 men on death row in Illinois that were later proved innocent. Those of you who are for the death penalty probably think so because its your definition of justice. But I am assuming that killing innocent people is not your idea of justice. The death penalty contradicts itself because its purpose is to stop innocent people from being killed and provide justice, but the system itself kills innocent people. The most powerful part of Ryan's speech was when he spoke of newly freed Anthony Porter. He said, "I watched in surprise as freed death row inmate Anthony Porter was released from jail. A free man, he ran into the arms of Northwestern University Professor Dave Protess, who poured his heart and soul into proving Porter's innocense with his journalism students." Reading this I immediately felt for Anthony. A horrible feeling came over me when I realized this innocent man was within 2 days of being executed because of our justice system. I thought, what if that was me? I was innocent but it didn't matter because the way the death penalty works is 12 people on a jury vote if you're going to live or die. It's that simple, they get to choose between life and death for somebody. This bothers me. It's that simple, just a yes or no vote and then it's ok to kill someone. If it weren't for the Northwestern students and their journalism project this innocent man would have been killed and there was nothing he could have done about it. With our justice system and the death penalty being final, it is that easy to kill innocent people. This is why Gov. Ryan commuted all persons on death row to life in prison without parole. That way those who need to can work to prove their innocence.

It took a few years after Gov. Ryan's blanket commutation for the death penalty to be eliminated in Illinois completely. Ultimately it was because of the same reasoning Ryan gave. The article from the New York Times on Illinois's decision to abolish the death penalty said "The debate over the death penalty was transformed. Suddenly, it was about accuracy." Again, the decision was just because when Pat Quinn signed the bill to abolish the death penalty, he did not do it because of his personal opinion. He did it because it was unlawful to execute innocent people and in reality that's what the death penalty does. The death penalty's lack of accuracy justified the decision to abolish it.

My last reason for it being just to abolish the death penalty was based on a personal experience. In my Issues class we did a project on the death penalty. The class is the clemency board and we hear a lot of death penalty cases as if they are happening now and vote for commutation or not. For many of the cases our class voted different than what went down in real life. Most of the time the class voted for life, and in real life the person was sent to death. This showed me the reality that while one jury might vote death , another jury might vote life. To me, it doesn't seem fair someone's life is dependent on which jury they get. If they had gotten a different jury, then maybe they would still be alive. This is not a just way to kill someone. However, a jury system is essential to democracy. Therefore, in a democracy the death penalty is unjust.

Ryan's speech commuting all persons in Illinois on death row stated "half of the capitol cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or resentencing. Nearly Half!" What does that show about the fairness of America's Justice System?

Savage Inequalities: Children of the City Invincible

In this chapter of Jonathon's Kozol's novel Savage Inequalities, he focuses on the opposing side to his argument. His argument is America's schools are not equal and therefore America is depriving its children of their rights to equal opportunity. Kozol addresses the counterargument, "Much of the resistance, it appears, derives from a conservative anxiety that equity equates to 'leveling.' The fear that comes across is that democratizing opportunity will undermine diversity and even elegance in our society and that the best schools will be dragged down to a sullen norm, a mediocre middle ground of uniformity." When I shared this with my dad, he agreed with this argument. He said not only in education, but in health care too. He believes if the government got involved in equalizing health care for everyone then the quality of it might decrease. Maybe for people like my family and me who are privileged to the best health care it would go down a little. But how can the quality of health care decrease to the majority of people who have no health care at all? The way I see it is for them any kind of health care is automatically an increase from their no health care. This idea applies to schools as well. So people like me might have to give up their extraordinary education to a normal education so that so many other people without an adequate education can also get a normal education. Does this sound so bad? Are we that selfish that we only see this idea of equal education as "leveling down" because for us there would be a decrease in quality. Of course no one looks at the "leveling up" for so many more people as a reason to go through with it. Instead, it's all about ourselves. I have to wonder if having a mediocre education would be that bad. If I maintain my values, I will still get good grades in school and go on to college. So I don't go to Harvard, big deal. Is it really that bad? Should I measure the success of my life by being the best at everything? Do I need the best education? Or realistically can I have a good life with a pretty good education, even if it's not "the best"? The way I see it is that other people need help, and people like me have the opportunity to help them. Like everything else in life, it takes sacrifices. I see it as an obligation. I don't expect everyone to see it as an obligation, after all they've worked hard and made sacrifices so their kids can have this splendid education. The people who don't see it as an obligation, I hope they would do it because they want to, not because they're obligated to. After all, they know best how important education is because of the sacrifices they've made for their own children's education. Do they not want this for all children?
The people opposing the equalization of the public schools do not see the irony in their argument. They spend a lot of money on lawyers and the services of experts to say that money is not the real issue. Kozol writes, "Do they really ask us to believe that laws of economics, which control all other aspects of our lives in this society, somehow cease to function at the school-house door?" The other side argues money is not important in bringing up the quality of education in many schools. If money is not what's important, then they should have no problem giving up some of their money to the other schools. Those with money and a good education cannot logically expect poor people without an adequate education to believe them when they say money isn't important.