Sunday, September 28, 2014

Aiding a Community One Stroke at a Time

Rowing is a sport that most people do not know a whole lot about. For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when they picture rowing is the Olympics, or Ivy League schools competing. One woman that I talked about rowing with last year said, "I thought rowing was only for rich English guys". It is very rare that rowing is ever associated with underpriveleged communities. However, last Saturday,  I competed against a rowing team here in Chicago, composed almost entirely of high schoolers from underpriveleged areas on the south and west sides of the city. This racing was entirely different than what I was used to.

Last spring, I was lucky enough to compete at Scholastic Nationals, held in Princeton, NJ, where the parking lots were filled with both german luxury sedans, coach buses, and competitors unloading $40,000 racing shells off of trailers. On Saturday on the other hand, my team and I pulled up to a canal on the south side of Chicago about fifteen minutes from Midway Airport. As we walked through the rusty fence topped with barbed wire, we saw that the home team had a high percentage of black and hispanic members, something that was unusual for rowing.

As I learned throughout the day of competition (I was there from 6am to 1:30 pm), this Chicago rowing program, know as the Chicago Training Center, or CTC, was tremendously helping it members with not just the sport itself but also academics, post-high school plans, and growing as young adults. As my coach explained to my team, the CTC program has given its members an entirely free team sport where no cuts are made. The program, founded and coached by former Oxford oarsmen, Montana Busch, also provides some students with occasional free tutoring, with the help of Loyola University of Chicago (Chicago Training Center Website). In videos on the CTC website, rowers explain that CTC has allowed them to seriously consider attending college due to the scholarships and help with admissions that rowing can provide. 

This rowing team, which once looked entirely out of place in its community, has become much more than just an ordinary rowing team. It is an organization that is managing to change lives, and the potential for the future of many of its members is looking much brighter because of it. I truly hope that CTC will certaintly not be the only crew program of its kind in the United States. 




Thursday, September 18, 2014

"Don't Forget Your GoPro"

As I reclined in my friend's boat under a warm July morning sun, I marveled at Lake Michigan's near complete stillness, and total abscence of cloud in the sky. My friend, waterskis submerged in the water, hunched over a small camera, and banged on the deck with a fist as he struggled to get the Go Pro camera to work. "I'm heading in" he said, "if it doesn't record for me this time. I'm sick of this."

The GoPro, a small gray camera enclosed in nearly indestructible plastic armor, is intended for filming one's point of view, and can be combined with an array of mounts and straps that can attach the camera to anything from a forehead, to a mountain bike, to the tip of a snowboard. As Nick Paumgarten explains in his article about the GoPro, "We are a Camera", featured in The New Yorker, the founder of GoPro, Nick Woodman, took his invention, originally intended to help film himself surf, and, with the help of the era of technology and social media, turned it into a company, valued at three billion dollars at its initial public offering. 

The GoPro has made it easy to film both adventure and everyday activities in ways that were once very difficult to do. GoPro has created a link between  filming and social media. ". . . the GoPro name [has] become shorthand not only for all P.O.V. cameras. . . but for the genre of short video that has arguably become as much a feature of daily life as the three minute pop song", says Paumgarten. The camera, with its skyrocketing popularity, has grown from a cool gadget to something notably damaging to people's behaviors.

The capabilities of the GoPro has negatively changed the way people take part in activities, causing 
them to take risks and obssess over getting the best shots for film. As Paumgarten explains in his article, pro mountain biker, Aaron Chase, described riding his bike among a herd of elk in the Smoky mountains as "hell" all because he was unable to get his camera to film it. I would describe it as a once in a lifetime experience. Unfortunately for Aaron Chase, this experience will be remembered something he failed to capture. 

Unfortunately, this negative attitude towards enjoyable experiences has not limited itself to those using the GoPro as part of their career ( i.e. many extreme sport athletes now). I see in my life, people ranging from distant acquantainces to close friends, focusing activities around capturing a shot on film, photograph or video. As my friend expressed that one morning we went boating, there wasn't really much of a point to us jetskiing any longer if he could not get it on his GoPro. The appeal of jetskiing is not gone just because of this camera, however, in the eyes of my friend, the experience surely was not complete. The goal of the outing was not just to enjoy ourselves this time, it was to let others know what we were doing and that we were enjoying ourselves.

This new goal in life is not just the result of the GoPro camera. I have witnessed similar effects with Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and I am sure I am missing others. These sites and apps have all caused people at my school and in my community to stress over their "appearance" on these apps. They must maintain a certain status or something like that. The GoPro is simply a piece of hardware, the only piece that I can think of for that matter, that is enabling or moving forward the transition to a social media oriented world. Maybe the GoPro is the first of social media hardwares, or the last, but it is certainly taken away from the joys of jetskiing. 


Monday, September 15, 2014

What does "Minimum" truly mean?

Shortly following Labor Day this year, several hundred protestors, primarily fast-food workers, took to the streets of New York, chanting in unison their desire for a fifteen dollar minimum wage. After the city police contained the workers with metal barricades, they arrested 19, using plastic disposable                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        handcuffs, cramming them into the back of police vans (William Finnegan, The New Yorker). According to William Finnegan, in his piece, Dignity, featured in The New Yorker magazine, these fast-food workers were employed by a number of restaurant chains across New York, and were victims of the cruel systems designed solely to maximize profit. The piece centers both on current union movement against abusive fast-food empires, and the story of a Arisleyda Tapia, a McDonald's worker, and single mother of a young girl, making $8.35 an hour.

The way that Finnegan wove together the personal story of this struggling woman with the recent events in the battle "to get a union and fifteen", as the protestors say, was eye-opening to say the least.  Through revealing the harsh realities of working for an emotionless fast food empire, Finnegan has convinced me that the politicians in Washington need to stop worrying about every possible, little consequence of adjusting the minimum wage in every which way, and start focusing more on the fact that there are millions of Americans suffering from the current policy at this very moment.

As I used to see it, the argument over whether to raise the minimum wage or not did have two very strong sides. However, inaction means that nothing with change for those working minimum wage jobs, who are unable to adequately provide for their families, or afford a quality education, despite working full time. One recent study revealed the figure of minimum wage fast food workers that require some form of public assistance at nearly 52 percent. That is not a figure being predicted by some politician or economist who is not even involved in the issue; that is what is really happening to actual people.

This does not seem to fit into the American ideals that I grew up being familiar with. Isn't the US government supposedly one of the fairest in the world, emphasizing equality and freedoms for all people, regardless of class, race, gender, or beliefs? Though the US government is not oppressing anyone directly, millions of American citizens are without many freedoms because the US government cannot decide whether they should allow workers stable living incomes. The government isn't quite sure whether Tapia deserves the money to send her daughter to preschool.

While simply rasing the minimum wage will not simply result in aiding the lower class without any reverberation, the separation between classes in this country may be growing so vast that reverberations may just have to dealt with for the time being.With the differential between income of the typical fast food worker and the C.E.O. of the respective company in the country averaging as high as 1200 to one, it is difficult to say that fairness and equality is still as economically present in our nation as it should be (Finnegan). If our nation wants to maintain the values that it prides itself so greatly on exemplifying, then our country must accept that working class citizens and C.E.O.'s alike, are both entitled to a certain standard of living.

Monday, September 8, 2014

A Nation Driven by Competition

In honor of the NFL kickoff weekend, millions of people invest hours of there time to root for their favorite team in the hopes of starting the season off with a win. Throughout the fall and into the winter, victories lead to celebration and losses result in curses shouted and even tears shed as the road to the Super Bowl inevitably shortens. Driving the passion behind these millions of viewers, to the point of procrastinating away Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, is the hope that their   favorite team can defeat all the others. This is the basis behind some of the most lucrative programming in all of entertainment, and this is just one sport in our country. 

Before I became a critical blogger (a profession that I made for myself earlier this week) I would have thought nothing of the popularity of competitive sports in the United States. However, my new  critical lens of the world leads me to question why our country has more professional sports franchises than any other nation in the world. Also, 44 of the top 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world are American teams, all football, baseball, or basketball. Although the most valuable team in the world happens to be England's Manchester United, no country even rivals the United States in terms of total money in the professional sports industry.

This may not seem to be very significant to many Americans, because it is all they know; it is part of being an American. However, I would assume that a foreigner, even from somewhere as relatively culturally similar to us as Europe, would realize the major role of sports in everyday life.

I believe that the extreme popularity and importance of sports in our culture is a result of something
something that is deeply ingrained in our culture. Something that comes to mind is the competitiveness in our culture to always be the best, possibly due to our position as a global super power, acquired in the first half of the twentieth century. Or maybe, it goes back even farther, to our country's origins as a rebellious group of colonies, fighting for their own beliefs against a much more powerful adversary. Is it, and has it always been, the American way?

I am not even close to a solid answer to this question. Still, it is one of the many pressing questions that I hope to gain a more solid understanding of in this class throughout our study of history , and our study of the very water that we are swimming in as Americans.