Final Thoughts

Rachel Becker

Last Week Post

May 7, 2012

            In reflecting on what I learned from this semester, I am also thinking about what I learned as a sociology student at Connecticut College.  Sociology was never a subject that was offered at my high school, so my entire experience with the discipline comes from this college.  Although we don’t really offer capstone courses here, I think of this seminar as my capstone of studies with Professor Jafar.  It brought several narratives that we’d been discussing through all of my four years here to a much higher level.  I think over all that we have been asked to question how we all relate to each other.  That is, after all, what sociology is about – how societies and the people within them function on an individual and global level.  As we have seen with really every reading this semester, there is always much more interplay than we are aware of.  And often there is no easy solution – just because something is wrong does not mean that it can be stopped immediately without repercussions.

Of course, once we are tuned into how we function, it is hard to unsee it.  Arundhati Roy (2002) perfectly captured how it feels to me to be a sociology student when she wrote, “Or, on the contrary, in the midst of putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war.  And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out.”  I have many times found myself in a position where my eyes have been opened to an issue that I feel passionate about and I feel pressured to stay quiet.  It is usually accompanied by a feeling that no one cares or it is too heavy an issue to bring up randomly, but it is nevertheless in my head.  A funny example of this is that I was talking to my friend about coffee and the terrible conditions under which a majority of coffee is imported into the United States and she said she didn’t want to know because once she knew she would have to care.  We finished our conversation, and she now buys different coffee.  It is advantageous to politicians and corporations for individuals to feel this pressure to stay silent or this weight if they do choose to speak up and make different choices.  It is these scare tactics that allow for our current systems of power to stay in place.

In terms of globalization specifically, I think the aspect that’s been most disturbing to me is the way the American perspective has been deemed the utmost authority.  There is a feedback cycle where the American opinion is then validated and the arrogance is made to seem reasonable.  It scares me that this is the case and it scares me that most people will not work to get another perspective.  That’s another thing that was enforced this semester – multiple perspectives are essential to understanding an issue.  It is highly probable that both sides will have some bias or some fact wrong, but you will at least get a more complete picture.  I have been consistently surprised by the intricacies of issues, both global and right in front of us.  It is also important to note that what goes on locally could be as a result of global actions or local issues could have global repercussions.  We may not have been able to decide if the world is flat or not, but we are certainly overwhelmingly connected.  I will not be able to give up this lens but I also wouldn’t want to.