While being home is great so far, there are things that linger in the background and news stories that remind me of some of the ridiculous and frustrating aspects of my home.
1.) Cub Foods. The local grocery store a few blocks from my house was a bit of a shocker. WHY does it need an entire aisle dedicated to showcasing the 50+ brands of breakfast cereal, each with its own selection of flavors? All except a small minority are dedicated to arranging simple sugar molecules in different colors and shapes. After that, all I wanted to do was buy some crackers so I could put manjar on them. What I found was another aisle dedicated to round, rectangle, square, rippled, woven, white, wheat, wheat berry, multigrain, ground flour, seedy-flour, sugar, no sugar, salt, no salt, fat, low fat, size-specifically-for-a-block-of-cheese and technologically-engineered-to-not-crumble-in-the-bag crackers. Okay, maybe not the last two. Am I being unappreciative of the option to choose the exact cracker that meets my specific needs? I feel like there are more important jobs that need to be done than engineering the perfect cracker...
2.) Gun control. In Uruguay, the president came up with a program to exchange guns in people's homes for bicycles. In Chile, you have to go through an intense series of background checks to get a gun. In the US? We let school shootings happen almost a year after the Sandy Hook massacre because some people thing it's their "right" to own a gun, preventing necessary legislation from passing that could help reduce violence for the rest of US citizens.
Here's the exact text of the bill of rights amendment:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Yes, it may be your right to own a gun if you choose to interpret these words as: the people have the right to "bear" (should that REALLY mean own?) arms for whatever reason you want.
In my opinion, people have the right to bear and use arms if their government is attacking them and controlling them like a dictatorship would, so they can defend themselves. Do we have that situation right now in the US? Absolutely not.
In general, the people who are adamant about implementing drug tests for welfare qualifications (In MN, it hasn't been very successful) and voter ID laws to prevent people from abusing these systems are the same people preventing gun control legislation from passing. Why are you against abusing one system, but totally fine with letting people abuse another system that undoubtedly causes much more damage?
3.) Drunk driving. In Chile, there's a zero tolerance policy for drunk driving. It seems to be very effective; my Spanish teacher in Chile said that people are now insisting on passing the keys instead of the other way around. In the US, I keep hearing about the cases of repeat offenders STILL being allowed to drive and getting away with hurting and killing people with mere fines. The most recent case of 16-year-old Ethan Couch who killed 4 people and injured 9 while driving drunk is a reflection of our problem. Yes, there are a multitude of reasons for why he got off (affluenza? really?), but I think a significant reason is that we have created a culture that tolerates drunk driving WAY too much. Even if he didn't care about the consequences that might result for others, maybe if we had stricter laws he may have thought twice about his actions.