Post #8: Social Class/Deviance

Hello hello! It's Justin back here again, and today I wanted to talk a little bit about deviance, but mainly about social class and how it affects the American public. Very quickly, to sum up deviance, one must also realize that culture is relative. While something done in one culture, such as eating bugs, may be seen as weird and unnatural, in another culture it may be a normal part of life. I think that people judge others all the time for how they act, unless they live up to what their own standards of normalcy are. If people could learn to judge with a little bit more of a filter, then maybe deviance could start to become the norm. However, today I mainly want to discuss the effects of social class and the wealth gap. This is a subject that hits close to home for me. I live in a house where there has been no long-term employment by my parents for over 3 years. I see how tight money can get. When you go to use the internet but it doesn't work because Comcast hasn't been paid, or when you have to loan your dad a couple of bucks for breakfast in the morning, that is when I think about social class the most. This situation was really brought home for me in the movie The Line. In the film, one of the men shown has a situation that is almost exactly parallel to my current family situation, and he now lives on welfare and food stamps. While we are not on welfare, and nowhere close to it, the man's plight really opened my eyes to the widespread poverty within the US. I thought that my family situation was bad, and in many ways it is, but I realized that it could always be worse. The writing Saints and Roughnecks, about two different classes of students within a high school, also made me think about how income can affect one's personality, choices, and education. I realized while reading the passage that I could think of many parallels to my own high school. That is something that, in the long run, is not very comforting. I said in a previous post that socialization had been my favorite unit in class. I take that back now, because the social class/deviance unit really became the most influential and important unit to me.