PETA

PETA is well known across the country and I learned yesterday that it is known in other countries as well. I first heard of PETA when I decided that I wanted to become vegetarian and I searched for information. That year I signed a petition and I received stickers in the mail. Since that I’ve been receiving information about PETA, but I never felt like signing petitions was enough. I’ve always wanted to change the world and this seemed like a wonderful opportunity. However, I got too caught up in my life and forgot about this goal.

It was very convenient that professor Bump took us to see the PETA/SACA display because it helped us be aware there are students at UT who are actively working on improving the lives of animals and doing what they can to prevent cruelty to animals. This display was appropriate for our class because people’s ethics allow them to mistreat animals when in reality they should be treated just like any other human being. I admire these people and I want to become one of them. I wrote down my information on a list they had and I can’t wait to get information and get involved in this student organization. I will finally begin working on my goal and make a change.
The displays that were shown yesterday were impressive. The purpose of the gruesome pictures was to give people a visual of how animals are mistreated and I can tell you that they did this effectively. The message that they were trying to get through was to show people that animals are just like us.

One of these pictures said “They’re just like us” and when I read this, I automatically thought of Lewis Carroll. Like PETA, Carroll wanted people to treat animals as well as they treated people. This is why he gave the animals human traits in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. However, Carroll wrote his book a long time ago and I don’t think he had a great impact on how animals were mistreated. Instead, people focused on the symbolism in the books and they tried to justify his reasons for writing what he wrote. On the other hand, the main focus of PETA is to save animals and inform people about animal cruelty.

I spoke to one of the girls in that were giving out freebies to people and I asked about how SACA (Students Against Cruelty to Animals) is involved in the community and she seemed so optimistic about making a change. She told me about their meetings on Tuesdays and how they are trying so hard to even make a small change. I admired that she was realistic about the changes that she can make as a student and still remained optimistic to take those “baby steps” to ultimately make a bigger change.

Animals in Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass wouldn’t be the same without the animals. The animals in both books have personalities and feelings. I believe that Lewis Carroll wanted to stress this in both books because we often overlook animals. Many people don’t show sympathy or empathy for animals because they think that animals don’t have feelings or personalities because they don’t speak our language.

It is obvious that “… in Carroll’s eyes, pain is in no way justifiable. The seemingly never-ending torture of a creature is the true crime.” (Unknown author) I think that Carroll had the animals talk in both books because he wanted people to see what animals would be like if they could talk. This was possible because Carroll made it realistic by assigning the animals personalities that determined how they acted towards Alice. This also allowed the readers to understand that animals have feelings too and that they don’t like being mistreated. In chapter two when Alice is talking to the mouse about cats he says, “As if I would talk on such subject! Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name again.”(26)

“From the very beginning of the book, Alice’s journey is typified by movement away from the ordered world of human society, and into the chaotic world of nature. “ (Daniel) The Alice book is a good example because of the different personalities that the animals have and the ways in which they respond to Alice. We all know people who are always in a hurry like the rabbit, people who shouldn’t be in power like the queens, victims of society like the mouse, etc. I think that it was very clever of Carroll to give realistic personalities to these animals because after reading this, hopefully people can begin to see animals as living individuals who need to be treated fairly and with care.

Even though Carroll focuses on the animals in the Alice in Wonderland book, he talks about plants in Through the Looking Glass. In chapter two of Through the Looking Glass Alice shows her concern about the plants by asking, “Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?”(158) This shows that Carroll also cared about nature and thought that people also had to take care of it.

I don’t think that Carroll ever thought that his book would become so famous that it would be read all over the world and he didn’t think of how the views of animals differ in many cultures. In some cultures it’s okay to eat cows; in others it isn’t and so on. After reading the Alice books I have learned to think of animals from a different perspective because the only thing that differentiates us from them is our rationality and our language.

Links?

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28885/28885-h/images/p0030-dormouse.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a7/Movie_alice_in_wonderland_flowers.png

http://popcritics.com/movies/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/alice_in_wonderland.jpg

A Change for Lefties

[1]

Left-handed people are challenged everyday by the way the world is designed. Today, most gadgets are designed for the majority of the population, right-handed people. Unluckily, devices for left-handed people are limited, difficult to find and unaffordable to some people. Some minor challenges left-handers face include using right handed scissors, writing utensils, guns, guitars, motorcycles, notebooks, knifes, doors, etc. These right-handed items go unnoticed because society has grown to believe that “that’s just how things are”.[2] However, not all these challenges are minor. For example, left-handed people in the U.S. drive American vehicles which have the steering wheel on the left side of the car and the gears on the right side. As a result, traffic accidents occur because we, left-handers, are required to use our right hand to switch gears. Tell me; do you still find it surprising that “two thousand five hundred left-handed people die each year directly as a result of using products designed for right-handed people”?[3]

These challenges may seem irrelevant to most right-handed individuals, but I think it’s become a hassle more than ever. This is because the population in the world is increasing significantly which means more lefties. Nowadays, “…as much as ten to fifteen percent of the population is left-handed”.[4] If statistics say that the left-handed population is growing, shouldn’t left-handed objects be more affordable and common? I believe that part of the reason for this lack of left-handed gadgets is because nobody has spoken up.

Ever since I began school, I’ve stood out from my peers because I’m left-handed. In Pre-K, I had a difficult time learning how to write and it took extra effort for me to cut straight with right-handed scissors. As a little girl, I didn’t know that all these items were designed specifically to facilitate tasks for right-handed people, but I knew I was different. Nonetheless, I’ve always preferred to think of myself as gifted because I’ve had to adapt. By living in a right-handed world I have been forced to exercise both of my hands more than others. This leads me to believe that if I could write neater with my right-hand, I’d be convinced that I’m ambidextrous. Luckily, being ambidextrous or ALMOST ambidextrous is applauded by society today.
Though, this has not always been the case. [5]

Left-handers were discriminated long ago. In the medieval times, lefties were seen as “evil” because “the scriptures say [that being left-handed] is of the devil”.[6] They believed that “the word ‘left’… [came] from the Anglo-Saxon ‘lyft’, meaning ‘weak’ or ‘broken’’.[7] A more recent example would be that decades ago “…teachers in America used to slap the wrists of students who attempted to write with their left hands”.[8] On the other hand, there are also positive myths about lefties.

One of them is that “…being left-handed means having a dominant right side of the brain… [and] have slight advantages in baseball”.[9] Having a dominant right side of the brain gives lefties an advantage because the right side of the brain works more with emotions, wholes and relationships among the parts, simultaneous and holistic thinking, and it also deals with synthesis.[10] Whatever the myths are or were, the world still hasn’t been fixed for lefties. Surprisingly, even in such a diverse university like UT, there are insufficient accommodations for left-handed people.

When I began school here at UT, I expected to see many accommodations for lefties, but I was [11] disappointed. On the first day of school, when I was seated in the Will C. Hog building I noticed that there are three hundred and sixty-five seats, but only fourteen of those desks are have the arm tablet reversed. If ten to fifteen percent of the U.S. population isn’t right-handed then the rationality is incorrect in this hall.[12] This was when I decided that something needs to be done. Lefties in this university need a leader to make the changes and that is me. According to Covey, “the leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”[13]

Undeniably, the advantages of being a UT student are the limitless resources available to me which I could only benefit from. What will also contribute into helping me become a leader are the courses that my major requires. In order to attain a psychology degree, I am required to take various social science classes such as sociology and psychology. These classes will allow me to understand human behavior. Understanding human behavior will help me be an ethical leader, how to approach the issue, and how to approach human beings.

My UGS class, Leadership, Ethics and Animals, is focused on leadership and it will help me become an ethical leader and allow me to be “reborn” again discover who I am. Knowing who I am will help me decide what I need to do in life and my strengths and weaknesses. In this class I’ve learned that “…if we don’t develop self-awareness…we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default”.[14] It has also been very informative about the resources available like writing centers that I most likely consult when I begin working on my goal. Furthermore, this class will make me a better writer and reader by implementing and challenging my reading and writing proficiency everyday of the semester.

Mr. Bump has stressed throughout the semester that writing is an aptitude that can facilitate life for people and make a great impact in society. The writing class I take will confidently allow me to improve my writing skills. Skillful writing will help me persuade people and make a change. Good writing and good reading are correlated and that class will also help me become a better reader. Literacy will unquestionably be helpful when I begin working on my leadership vision because if I can read and write well, I can communicate with people. Better developed writing skills will allow me to communicate with people nonverbally and make a greater impact. Other classes that will help me enhance my ability to communicate with others are the foreign language classes that I am required to take. Learning another language will make trilingual and I will be a better-rounded individual.

However, not all the classes that I am required to take will make me a better-rounded person or help me reach my goal. I must also take a U.S. history class, two math classes, three biology or physics classes, and a visual and performance arts class. Even though these classes are irrelevant to my leadership vision, I ought to take them if I want to become a psychologist. I will not allow obstacles to stand in my way of becoming a leader in my community. I will take these ineffective classes as soon as I can and constantly remind myself that “…education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them”.[15]

[16]

My college experience will definitely play a big role in my aspiration to make a change at UT. I will join the Student Government, and express the needs of left-handed students. I also want to hold a leadership role such as president or vice-president before the end of my junior year in the Student Government. Even though I have everything planned out, things don’t go our way all the time. That is why I believe in always having a backup plan because we never know what might happen. My plan B is to begin my own organization for lefties in the university. I highly doubt that it will be difficult to find at least two other lefties who share the same ideas as me and pay the ten dollar fee to start club. Starting a new club will allow me to unite all the left-handed people who would like to make a greater impact. I believe that by actually seeing all the lefties unite, the university will become aware of the amount of lefties in this university.

[17]

After achieving my goal of beginning a club or of becoming a leader in the Student Government, the next goal would be to work with the members and inform people about our everyday struggles. I will also inform people about “International Left-handers Day” which not a lot of people know about.[18] After informing people, the next step to that would be to bring this up to the university and hope that changes are made on campus. By January 2010, I should be able to become the voice for lefties or establish and promote my organization.
By next March, I will be educating people about how left-handed people are challenged and affected everyday. After doing this successfully, I will hopefully grab hold of the attention of whoever can add more lefty desks and a change will be made. The more supporters I have, the easier it will be to be heard. With the help of others, I am hoping to see changes on campus by next fall.

Making changes on campus will be a stretch goal that will lead me to making bigger changes in the future. Possibly, after achieving this, I will make change the world for left-handed people. It would be wonderful to one day create or influence a national organization that will support left-handed people and help them survive in this right-handed designed world. For the moment, I’m willing to focus on making a local change and doing my best to accomplish my goal the best that I can. I will constantly remind myself that “Men [and women], whose minds are possessed with some one object [or leadership vision], take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are utterly foreign to it, and are startled and despond if it happens to fail them.”[19]

Word Count without Quotes: 1,436
Word Count with Quotes: 1,654




[1] http://www.onehandedkeyboard.com/imagesfolder/leftkeyb.gif This is a picture of a left-handed keyboard.

[2] Richard Cussons, "Coping With Being Left Handed." Ezine Articles. April 20, 2006, http://ezinearticles.com/?Coping-With-Being-Left-Handed&id=182113.

[3] Kevin McCarthy, “How many left handed people die each year from using right handed products, ChaCha your mobile BFF, February 19, 2008. http://www.chacha.com/question/how-many-left-handed-people-die-each-year-from-using-right-handed-products.

[4] Richard Cussons

[5] http://radioinsidescoop.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/left-handed.jpg

[6] http://radioinsidescoop.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/left-handed.jpg
[7] Richard Cussons

[8] Richard Cussons

[9] Richard Cussons

[10] Stephen R. Covey. “Principle-Centered Leadership, 1990.” Leadership, Ethics, and Animals: A Signature Seminar, Ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s Copy & Binding, 2009), 225.

[11] http://www.css.washington.edu/pdf/classrooms/101389.png

[12] Richard Cussons

[13] Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (New York: Free press, NY, 2004), 100-101.
[14] Stephen R. Covey

[15] Paul Newman. “The Idea of a University, 1852.” Leadership, Ethics, and Animals: A Signature Seminar, Ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s Copy & Binding, 2009), 170.
[16] http://centex09.texasultimate.org/_/rsrc/1237387108165/sponsors-1/new%20SG%20logo.jpg

[17] http://www.leftorium.com/images/leftorium_400.jpg
[18] Richard Cussons

[19] Paul Newman

L.O.U.D.D.

L.O.U.D.D. was very interesting. The event was based on two of the topics in our class, leadership and ethics. Our spokesman was Dr. Gonzalez and he spoke about how our country is so hungry for leadership. He pointed out that “everything that happens around the world will affect us and that we should be aware about everything going on globally and locally”. After this statement I thought about how I had been ignoring that fact all my life and how important it is for me to be a leader in today’s society.

At the event we were all given name tags that also contained the two sessions that we were assigned to attend. I was assigned to go to an ethics session and a sustainability session and they were both interesting. However, the ethics session was my favorite. We started the session by circling things that we value on a paper we were given that included such values as achievement, accountability, advancement etc. After that we were asked to partner up with the person next to us and discuss our values. I learned that we don’t all have the same values as I had assumed at the beginning of this exercise.

After doing that we saw a clip of What Would you Do? At the beginning of the video a well dressed woman fell in the middle of a busy street in New Jersey and many individuals stopped to help. Then they changed the experiment by replacing the woman with a homeless man and not a lot of people stopped to help. The purpose of the video was to make us think about the assumptions that we make are influenced by our ethics. Another video that we saw was about teenagers who cheat in high school. The video had many statistics about students who cheat and lie, but ironically all 93% of the students who cheated said that they were satisfied with the ethics that they demonstrate and that they didn’t think that they were doing anything bad. After watching the video we discussed about how ethics were implemented a lot more in past generations and that is part of the reason why we prefer to think that we are doing the right thing because we assume that somebody else might be doing it more than us. Another reason for this is because we try to make up explanations for acting inadequately.

I’ve always wanted to be a leader because I think that it’d make me feel good and because I want to help others, but after listening to Dr. Gonzalez’s speech, I learned that leadership is no longer an option for all of us, it’s now a necessity in our everyday life. I also learned that not everybody else believes the same things and because of that we have different values which make our code of ethics differentiate when we compare them to somebody else’s. I always assumed that ethics was based on recognizing what is wrong and right and doing the right thing, but there’s a lot more to that.

This is the shirt they gave us for networking

with others. I love free t-shirts!

We're all an Alice at UT

Six weeks ago the Alice book would’ve been unrelated to incoming freshmen at UT. When I began reading the book I thought it was just a random assignment that professor Bump had given us all, but as I read through the book I learned that I could relate to Alice in various ways. In the book Alice “…is willing to venture into the unknown or, that which is beyond self” (208). When we decided that we wanted to attend UT, we were willing to leave our homes, family and friends behind to experience what was beyond our environment. It took me a little longer to realize how the Alice book linked to this leadership, ethics and animals class.

After giving it a tad bit of reflection I realized that Alice is a hero in the book because she “…encourages us to ‘know thyself’” (208). At the beginning of the course we discussed how we are now attempting to figure out who we really are or who we want to be. It’s a natural conflict that occurs within us as we learned in the Alice book. Our search for self identity is relevant when it’s compared to the book. On page 208 Humpty Dumpty asks Alice who she is and when she tells him he asks what it means. Her response is “Must a name mean something?” (Alice 208). In the book, Alice is expected to know what her name is, but we are expected to know who we are and who we want to be.

There are other internal conflicts that are occurring in our minds as well like learning to survive our first year at UT. The campus is huge, the classes are challenging, there are so many students and we feel tremendously overwhelmed. In the book, “Alice finds the key to power by rising to the challenge of survival in Wonderland” (210). Once we learn to approach this situation, we regain our confidence and we face the situation with courage and motivation. An example of this in the Alice book is when “she opens the door to power with the self-confidence that she had all along that was hidden” (210).
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice is not longer wandering around in Wonderland. She is now attempting to become a queen and she is the only person she can turn to for guidance and comfort. She tries to get help from others, but nobody sees things from her point of view. In our case we are being forced to guide ourselves at times because of the vast diversity here at UT. Alice’s leadership and ethics are obvious in the book. Her decisions are based on the values that she was brought up and she learns to become her own leader in the book by making her own decisions. In the end we all want to be queens/kings (graduate from UT) and we are in our journey in our own personal UT Wonderland.

Links?

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://fc00.deviantart.com/fs6/i/2005/085/6/3/Alice_in_Wonderland_by_HeatherIhn.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/16534987/&usg=__C5u_fk93WigmAJkFrKM6tcy_uEI=&h=500&w=416&sz=81&hl=en&start=71&tbnid=nPQYTYCsoeOk9M:&tbnh=130&tbnw=108&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dalice%2Bin%2Bwonderland%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D60
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://static4.echalk.net/www/10x331/site/ImageGallery/mrodriguez/alice_through_the_looking_glass.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.ms331.org/faculty/mrodriguez&usg=__N2dyd81-Uo52IzuFNMNptjGWcdI=&h=600&w=399&sz=39&hl=en&start=18&tbnid=CeYoZdWI_4YKjM:&tbnh=135&tbnw=90&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dalice%2Bin%2Bwonderland%2Bthroughout%2Bthe%2Blooking%2Bglass%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX