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The best way to create true social change would have to be banding together, side by side, and fight for what you believe in. Weak ties and strong ties play heavily into this. I think if everyone is able to have a voice in a movement, then more ideas can be added or scrapped to be able to change an idea into a more evolved and more complex thought. I believe that the internet can do great things for people. Weak ties can be turned into strong ties by a message. Ideas can be spread by places such as a blog or facebook wall. Connecting with people and finding common grab is super important to create change. When we fight for change we are not just fighting for ourselves, we should be fighting for every human being who is being oppressed. We should be fighting for the Earth, and the wonderful creatures that live on it. We need to band together as one, and if we do that, social change is not just a dream, an idea, it will actually change the world into a better place. Yes it is true that the world will never become a utopia, but we need to fight it from becoming a dystopia.

McKibben talks in his piece “Movements without Leaders” and he explains how todays revolutions do not have cut and dry leaders, BUT it seems to be that everyone is pitching in and they are all like leaders in a sense, working hard together. This reminds me of Charles Duhiggs piece called “From Civil rights to Megachurches” When he talks about strong and weak ties within the chruch. Duhigg talks about how there were a bunch of churchgoers who took on the task of hosting bible studies at their houses, and it allowed the church to grow super quickly, and it was because there were many smaller leaders who were able to use strong ties to make a bunch of weak ties between the small groups which all attended the church. The question is do movements work better with leaders OR without promient but many leaders, and I think the answer is to have many leaders. If everyone feels like they are needed to make change they are going to fight harder and harder for what they believe in instead of following the visions of one person they are all able to collabarate and create change together. I think it is important to have some well known figures AND have everyone be a “leader” at the same time.

McKibben is fighting for social change by uniting people in a revoulution to get the fat cats of the oil industry to have to pay for the damage they are doing to the enviroment. He started his 350 campaign and it has garnered massive support throughout the world, especially a lot of colleges. He is trying to spark what all of us are thinking! Why should a few people in this world benefit off of ruining the peoples planet. He is a very effective public speaker and he uses that to his advantage. Kingsolver does things differently. While McKibben has written to gather attention, Kingsolver uses writing as her main source of getting the word out about the issues that we are facing today. Kingsolver talks about how someone who reads her book is going to be inspired by it and want to take action, and I think that her reading can get people pushed towards McKibbens 350 movement and I think the two go hand in hand as you need to read about an issue before you go ahead and dive right in. Personally, I think McKibbens way of doing things is much more effective as making noise is the best way to get change because you are forcing people to be uncomfortable and they realise you will let off if they do what you want them to do.

A huge reason why we still struggle with racism has to be all the past mistakes we have made and have done nothing to fix them. Back in the 1800s when factories where becoming a very common occurence, the U.S. government allowed many european immigrants to come and work, although they had many freed slaves that could have done the job. This allowed the white people to get jobs and get a decent ammount of wealth which allowed them to have an advantage over the blacks that were already over here. Another reason why racism is still a thing is because of stereotypes, such as black men are aggressive and commit crimes and mug people. This is completely false. Another reason is geographic location. We shoved the blacks into crowded poor areas and did not give any government assistance to these areas. A common stereotype to black people is that black people are mooching off of wellfare, and I have actually heard some people tell me that black people had kids so that they could collect more benefits from the government. Yes, I have actually heard people actually say that. People being uneducated is a huge reason as well, if they do not know the facts they cannot possible make true statements.

Social change is a huge factor in life, and I think sometimes people forgot how we can impact each other. Take for example gay rights, it may not impact you personally so you may not care about them. But if you stop and think about the millions of people who are being denied the rights they deserve as human beings, you start to want to fight for them. That is true for all sorts of changes needed. Think about how you could make the world a better place. It will not always have a direct impact on you but if you fight and strong for others rights there will be a dramatic decrease in violence in the world and there will not be so much hate. We should care about social change because it can make the Earth a better place, and that is never a bad thing. We should all band together so we can make the world a better place for everyone. What is the point of living if not everyone is happy? I think the world is the complete opposite and it needs to be changed. This world is a mess and we need change and we need it fast.

I believe that in order to get anything accomplished, you need to take something that the community is familiar with and give it a boost. Duhigg talks about in his piece how Warren changes up church to make it more appealing to people by “[H]e told people to wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, if they felt like it” This quote was about churchgoers! Normally when you think about church you think about dressing up, but Warren realised that more people would want to go to church if it was more relaxed and not so focused on dressing up and being boring. Epstein, in her “Aids Inc” Epstein talks about how the Y-Centers “young people could learn to play basketball, volleyball…” Now both of these quotes talk about giving a cool factor to things and being able to handle something by letting the people choose what they want to do, but in both cases, things do not work as planned. The AIDS epidemic still hit South Africa hard, and Warren in Duhiggs writing found out that church groups were getting together and discussing the bible for ten minutes then chitchatting. In order to get things to work you need a hard hitting approach, but while being able to not show the hard hitting intentions.

I think this is another great example of a communtiy banding together to fight for what is right, and it again plays on the idea of social cohesion. One of the main points I noticed in this reading is that one of the most important factors in determining how much something would succeed depended on weak ties. The article explains weak ties as a friend of a friend. I can see how this would be the most important part to starting a movement or getting something done. Strong ties are just in between small groups of people and no one else will relate to that yet weak ties, everyone has friends that are not mutual friends with all of their friends. And with this, people from all over can hear about someone whose friend’s friend did this and all that, and it can create support from someone the person does not even know. Weak ties allow the information to flow through a community, so if you do not even know who the person is you can still be on their side. I think that applies for a lot of things. We talked about gay rights, well instead of mothers fighting for their gays sons rights, it is the mothers friends also fighting, which boosts up numbers of support, and that can be said for any cause, the more people you have supporting something, the stronger the fight will be!

Why are people discriminated against for being HIV and AIDS positive? One girl in AIDS INC said “IF you want me to meet people with AIDS, you better give me a rubber suit” (Page 115) Now this just shows me how uneducated the people who discriminate are. They do not realize that AIDS and HIV cannot be transferred without blood or sexual fluids getting inside the body. Handshaking someone who has AIDS or even being in the same room will not somehow magically get you infected with the disease. I think one of the reasons people think it can be caught by being near an infected person is when hospital staff and such wear masks around the patient. The masks are not there to protect the doctors. When you are infected with AIDS, it affects your immune system which causes it to be weak, and if the staff or vistors give a germ or pathogen to the infected it can increase the fate of mortality.

Another reason HIV and AIDS are so heavily discriminated is that in the 80s and 90s it was a common myth that only gay people could contract this illness, which was obviously false because Magic Johnson had gotten it in the 90s and he is not gay. Of course people just automatically assumed he had sex with a man, but in reality being a “player” and sleeping with multiple women caused it. The homophobia in the world had taken AIDS as another reason to hate gays and say that they were not good for humanity and that they contain such a horrible virus, when in reality it is a disease anyone can get after being exposed so being gay has nothing to do with it. Thus with this connection AIDS and HIV got a negative “scare factor” and a reason to discriminate those who are infected.

The main takeaway I have gotten from Aids Inc, is that approach to subjects can make a huge difference to how things are handled. Dodging the issues and trying to make things trendy will never work.

Epstein makes a statement that “The sexy billboards… to persuade young people to avoid sex in the same way a sneaker ad tries to seduce them into buying new sneakers, because the players in the ads look cool” and to me, I just do not know how you could take a subject such as that and try to dissuade them without giving them any reasons why they should not do it. It just talks about how you should not do it, but if you do not explain why you should not do something, especially to teens, they will just think you are trying to stop them from having a good time, so they will say “screw it, I am going to do it anyways.” Billboards are not the way to handle this sort of problem. What you need to do as a public is encourage HIV and AIDS patients to share there stories and why you should practice safe sex or abstain from sexual intercourse at all.

A quote that really interested me was “Any young person could become a Y-Center member, but in order to fully participate in its activities, he had to complete a program of seminars about HIV, family planning, and other subjects… The seminars emphasized the biological aspects of the disease and its prevention, but not the experience of living with the disease.” To me, that is a huge problem. If kids are just taught that getting infected with HIV and AIDS is just going to cause this and this but other than that I will be okay, and it probably won’t happen to me. But when you have a person there, in the flesh, you can get the kids to understand the true struggle that the disease brings, and they will understand relationships will be different, and how they are treated will also change, and these kids never think about that because they are just taught about the biology and they never have to think about the social and personal impacts the disease brings.

I was deeply moved by some of the words Hallward spoke in her Ted Talk. The talk about struggle and how everyone goes through it, and that being open and honest about things makes them better.  It is very reassuring that I am not the only one that deals with horrible stuff, such as anxiety and depression, being uncomfortable with my sexuality (I am okay with it now) etc.  One of the things Hallwards says is “One of the things i have learned is it takes a lot of courage to speak a story that has been really silent.”(6:03) This quote really speaks to me about society as a whole. It should not have to take courage to speak up about problems, it should be a thing people do to help themselves and others, and not have to have it be this grand reveal of secrets that they have been bottling up. Shame is a horrible thing and it affects people in many different ways. 

In my past expericences and people I know, things get bottled up a lot, and then when they finally release their emotions things can go very bad very quickly. This can lead to violence and anger and it could strian relationships and even ruin them entirely. When something happens to you, you should open up about it, the only way to start the healing process is to admit there is something wrong. People should have less shame about things that happen to them. It is one thing if they are shamed that they did something bad, but it is a completely different thing to have something happen to you or something with your body or mind and have that be stigmatized as bad. Humans are social creatures and we should be helping our fellow man and woman, to help our society become one that does not judge, but one that helps and heals.