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| "Hate is easy, love takes courage"
I do not understand the second part.
I know, life is short.
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| I cannot wait until I find a politician who will not cut education as his/her first priority in a budget crisis. There are so many positive externalities to having an educated society.
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| Even though I should be working on my essay, I feel compelled to justify my reasons for signing the East Asian Language Education petition (http://petition.berkeley.edu/). I just reread the email that my previous English GSI sent me on the subject, so I looked at the petition again. While I do not agree with the fact that they focus on the East Asian Languages, I do agree with their demands of greater transparency with the budget and to not cut certain areas studies too much. I believe that it is important to know what is happening with the university and where the budget cuts are happening. With an increase in tuition and a decrease in the classes that we can possibly take, it does seem like our quality of education is going down. It is already difficult to get into the classes that you want, and it is just getting worse. I just want to know how much the other departments are being cut. I mean, I think all departments are getting cuts. However, the humanities seem to suffer the most. I probably mentioned this before, but the humanities are the most expensive to keep up and the benefits to the university are not as obvious. I mean, I know Cal for its science and engineering. They do pump that up. I mean, we are really close to Silicon Valley so it would probably be kinda weird not to have good engineering programs. They are much cheaper to maintain, too, with more students to a professor. Although this may be part of the reason it is cheaper to lay off humanities teachers, a bigger thing is probably the fact that people in the humanities do not have tenure. That is a really sad thing for the staff that has been teaching here for a long time but does not have tenure because they teach in the humanities.
I wish there was a more organized effort against Schwarzenegger. :( He did sort of cause all of this by giving less money to higher education. This makes me, more than ever, support the idea of having an extra 1% tax on California's billionaires that goes just to education. It would really solve all of the problems with educational budget cuts. However, our governor will never raise taxes, even if it is on the rich, who have way more than they will ever need. I hope people start to understand that one cannot have certain things like better education without higher taxes and that permanently lowering taxes is detrimental to the economy. This is assuming that all of the money that government is already getting is being used wisely and not being wasted anywhere.
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| That statement is very interesting. It basically means that people will believe whatever they believe regardless of whether it is based on any type of truth or not. Truth is something that is defined for every person. In that sense, reality may be different for everyone. And that really bugs me. It is something that is difficult for me to reconcile because as a child, I think I thought of things in terms of black and white. I am sure a lot of children did. Now there are just so many shades of gray that there is no such thing as "right." There is only what you believe.
I just took an hour or two perusing the Flat Earth Society's forums. I was really shocked because I believed that the earth being round was a fundamental fact that was already proven. I mean, there were pictures taken by NASA and everything. Flat-Earthers believe that it is all a conspiracy, albeit a complicated one. And I guess when you see it that way, you may think that this theory is completely hogwash because it is predicated on the belief that the government is always lying to you (which it may very well be doing). The flat earth idea is also supposed to be there to defend the Bible (I think). I thought that a round earth was the easiest thing to believe since they have pictures and "seeing is believing," right? They say that the images were created with really good imaging techniques. I mean they seem to have an answer for everything.
I do not know if the point of religion is to have an answer for everything. I know that science always tries to explain things, but I am sure that we know that science has certain limitations (take the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for instance). And maybe both religion and science believe that they are always right. I mean this whole "journey of life" that we go through is just each person's search for truth. I think that idea from the movie "Wit." I mean it is really good that people have different ideas because you do not want homogeneity in a people. Things would be boring. It is really difficult to accept other people's opinions though. For me, this is especially true when I look at politics. I cannot understand why people are willing to go to war and kill other human beings. I posted about this once and a guy commented and said, "the Song of Victory in Exodus 15 hails God as a God of war: "… The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name."" And I was pretty shocked. I thought that the fruits of the spirit were love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control... (I remember this from a song). So...peace is one of them. If the fruit of the spirit is peace, is that not the spirit of God? And finding this out, I could never be part of of something that validates war. I think I am getting away from my main point. Oh well, I guess I can be as disorganized as I want to be. >.>
I guess we take a lot of the things we believe in for granted. The fact that people even exist. What is there truly to validate existence? What if we are in that Matrix thing? With this in mind, I feel so disillusioned to the point of not being able to work, which is not good because finals are coming up. Where is my inspiration supposed to pulled from? How can I prove to myself that I want to be here? I guess I like what I am learning about though I feel like my efforts are fruitless. I could never be good enough to even make a big effect on people. I think a large part of why I feel justified in doing whatever I do is in order to help people. What is the point if people do not even want to helped or do not believe that they need to be helped? I think a difficult fact to accept is that people cannot be persuaded to change if they already have opinions on something. I do not know if that is part of human nature or if that is a part of a faulty education system. However, extremely educated people do believe in religion. It is all about how you see things.
I hate finding out that I can be incorrect about certain things because I am misinformed. Why are things so complicated? And I feel that no matter how much I learn, it will not make a difference because there is a bias in everything. In fact, Republican students at UC Berkeley complain about how some professors teach with a liberal bias. I hunger for the truth. I just want people to give it to me straight. I want to be able to make choices based on extensive analysis and careful consideration of a number of factors. I hate all the filters things go through, the way the media skews things. It is times like these that make me understand why Christopher McCandless went to live in the wild. I mean, sometimes I want to, too. I like human interaction, but society really sucks.
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