Pay to Play!

I had a very busy and exciting day on Wednesday, February 7th, as I had just signed to play football for Texas A&M Commerce. The very next period after the signing I had my economics class. With all the buzz of national signing day two friends and I began looking up all the other recruits in the Class of 2018 and searched to see where they had signed. While we were exploring, our teacher advised us to try and relate the topic to the course and things we had been discussing in class. So we happened to jump on the thought express and ended up at the destination of should the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, pay their players? (Just to clarify I am speaking across players of all sports but for the purpose of this essay and my love for the sport, I will be focusing on football)

After diving deep into the subject, I found a few articles and facts to help provide reasons why the NCAA should and shouldn’t pay their athletes. I will start with the idea that the NCAA should pay their athletes. When searching the first fact I decided to look up was how much revenue the NCAA makes off of college athletics. The results I found were astounding! The NCAA currently makes nearly $11 Billion in yearly revenue from college sports. If you didn’t know, that’s more than the estimated total league revenues of both the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League! In 2014, the University of Alabama reported $143 million in athletic revenues and that itself racked up more than all 30 NHL teams and 25 of the 30 NBA teams. If these numbers aren’t convincing that universities and the NCAA are more than capable of paying their athletes then I don’t know what is.

 

 

 

Citizenship Approved!

This past term in government my teacher challenged all government students to complete a modified form of the United States Citizenship Test, or simply put the Civics Test. There were many purposes for taking the test and also many valuable lessons learned. Overall, I felt as if the main purpose for us, as students of government striving to become responsible U.S. citizens ourselves, was to understand how difficult it is to become an American citizen. At the same time we needed to understand how highly sought-after citizenship here is in the United States too. To begin the topic of citizenship, we started by taking a practice quiz based solely off of each individual student’s common knowledge about the United States. After filling in all the answers we knew or attempted to guess on the quiz, we graded it; immediately after grading it most of us realized had we not been born in the states, then we wouldn’t have passed the Civics Test the first time around… and I think it’s interesting that our instructor really got the point across that it is not as easy as we envisioned to gain citizenship here. I’d say my favorite part of the unit was taking the test, learning all the information and then retaking the citizenship quiz and passing it. I felt a real sense of accomplishment and I too felt very proud “simulating” gaining my citizenship. Later Dr. Ostroff had shared with us in class that day how he’d been to one of the Citizenship Oath Ceremonies saying, “It was one of the best things I have ever experienced.” As he said this it spoke to me because even as Dr. O was just spectating in the crowd at the ceremony, he was moved by it; it was so moving in fact, that he followed up the last statement by saying to the class, “I was almost brought to tears and it is something I believe everyone should experience at least once in their life.” From taking the quiz and hearing these terrific experiences, I now hope that one day I may attend a ceremony myself.

People hold flags as they are sworn in as U.S. citizens during a naturalization ceremony on Tuesday, July 2, 2010 in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

The process to becoming an American citizen is pretty complex but many say the pay-off and wait is much worth it. Since the process is very long, so I have left a link that can be found here on AllLaw.com that breaks it down step by step. On Quora.com, an interactive website that is available world-wide where users may pose questions and have them answered by users, I searched the question: What is it like to become an American citizen? One answer in particular that caught my eye was a response from a user by the name of Ann Cun. In her answer, she responds to the question saying, “It was a pretty freakin’ awesome experience for me personally.” This opening statement alone probably relates to a lot of others newly certified citizens as well, which is why I chose to read her answer. She proceeds in her reply telling her whole story and how she completed all her forms in college to file for citizenship and spent a lot of hard hours studying for the Civics Test. At the end of her answer she recounts her ceremony and how she felt during it saying, “I felt a great sense of pride and community” and when she said this, it was literally exactly the equivalent of how I had felt after passing the quiz. She felt as if the time she’d put in preparing for the test to gain citizenship had paid off.

Altogether I just thoroughly enjoyed the citizenship portion of the unit and thought to share my experience of it and compare it to that of someone who had done the actual process. It’s very interesting seeing how similar everything was although my experience wasn’t as significant as the real deal.

The Political Spectrum + the Filter Bubble = Political Bubbles!

In American politics there are so many options as to where we may fall on the political spectrum. That being said based on our political views already pre-determines what political bubble we are blown into. We as Americans must find a way to pop this filter bubble and think of it more as an umbrella where we are under together.

The spectrum has a never-ending left side and a never-ending right side with varying gray space in between so not everybody in the same party has to have the exact same view as others. Starting from the left to right (Or Democrats to Republicans) giving a general breakdown of the most popular groups, I will begin with the Liberals. Liberals are the farthest left on the spectrum and they have views that are optimistic and clearly they take liberal views on most issues. In the grey area, or the middle, this is where we have the most diverse area on the spectrum because you can be on one side and still differ from their respectful view points. I’ll just split the center into two pieces containing the Center-Left and Center-Right. The Center-Left, also known as the Moderate-Left, is a particular part of liberal party holds most of the same beliefs as the liberal party but also agrees or sides with some of the right sides views. That being said the Center-Right, also known as the Moderate-Right, would then be the same situation but reverse to where a Conservative holds most the same beliefs as the rest of the right side but also agrees with some left-side views. The farthest right on the spectrum we have Conservatives. Conservatives hold strong Americans values and believe the role of the government is to provide their freedom necessary to pursue their goals.

For the Filter Bubble, it’s a means for social media websites and search engines to personalize and modify your results based on what they think you would like to view as far as suggestions, searches, who to follow, and what you might like. In an article, Bill Gates says it best, “social media ‘lets you go off with like minded people’” and that is exactly what the filter bubble is doing, it’s causing us to go politically numb. This becomes a problem because if you favor one view or party then the Filter Bubble begins editing and removing views, and people from the other view or party. This is problematic because if we don’t educate ourselves as Americans on all sides of our politics then we will never fully understand both parties and become blinded by own perspectives never knowing the opposition’s view although there could be crucial things we are missing or maybe agree on but we would never know because we are too engulf in our own parties. There are several alternatives to bursting the bubble have been thought up and developed. One of those ideas involve programs like such as Upworthy, this is “an online platform with the goal of ‘viralizing’ highly shareable and relevant contents”. Another very reasonable option is building better filtering algorithms. An even better way of eliminating the filter bubble from causing problems for us is just in general instead looking at what presented to us is diving deeper in things and look for ourselves.

 

In all, our politics and political views interact but at the same time interfere with our social media websites due to the filter bubble. These are just a few of many ways that we can limit or remove the filter bubble from our social medias and come to together seeing all sides of the spectrum.