JenniferDamaris Perez Sociology 101.21 Professor Christopher Quatrone July 19, 2010 My Sociological Reflection..

As I sit here trying to reflect on what I learn, I can say I learn more about myself this summer than I had ever known about myself. I have never been asked to reflect on my life or life experiences. As I began to sit down and write this paper, I seem to look back at my life and reflect on different periods of my life that were poignant. I never really thought about sociology and what it means nor did I fully understand its meaning and how it relates to life and situations and how we react in different situations. It took me some time for me to fully understand what sociology really is and how it relates personal decisions I have made in my life. Its the study of how we, as a people, society and culture interact and socialize in different venues of everyday life and what we do based on certain ideals. I never sat down and started to fully understand all the many obstacles I went through to get where I am, but I guess you can never know where you are going if you dont know where you have been. From an early age, I knew my life was very different than people I saw around me. I grew up in a Latino home with a single parent mother who had dropped out of high school and was striving for a better tomorrow with her two daughters. I had my grandmothers help in the raising of me and my sister and we grew up in poverty. I remember living on peanut butter and jelly and Mac and cheese and thinking this was the best stuff on earth, not realizing this is all we could afford. I grew up getting hand-me-downs and shopping at thrift stores. I remember my mother struggling through college and being a mom. I guess you learn and emulate what you see, because I followed the same path by becoming a single mother, going back to college to get an education and defining my life on my terms, regardless of the many obstacles testing my faith

along the way. We are very strong and incredible creatures in that we never really know how much we can really withstand until we are tested. We can undergo unimaginable adversity and come out and triumph because we learn to adapt. Everyone has their own story to tell and they are filled with many highs and lows and with each challenge, they learn how to move on to accomplish their goals and aspirations. We learn to have thick skin and adapt to every new challenge to not carry the burden with us, but rather to progress and be more able to handle the next situation we are faced with. In the film Walk on Water, we learn how complex we are as humans. We see the total change of heart when we get to know a person and not judge based on a personal lifestyle We see how we all have feelings and we all have demons in our closets that may not be of our choosing but we can still have a good heart and only have the best intentions. We see the human spirit at its best and see the true test of forgiveness. I took a lot out of this film that maybe others may not have gotten because we are all human and we need to keep that in mind. We all bleed and make mistakes and we need to learn to forgive and move on because hate can consume you. In the film, A Survivors Story, we see the tragic life of a women during her time at a work camp during the Nazi rule and Hitlers reign of terror among a group of people who really werent any different from you and me but were targeted and persecuted. It chronicled the journey of one woman and how she survived and became a pillar and how she to this day cant believe she made it through it all. It shows how the heart can forgive and the body can withstand what one would never think possible. The film really hit made me cry and had a happy ending in that she married the officer who in a sense saved her and brought her to freedom. It showed her strength. She had a guardian angel watching over her and she still carries the souls and hearts of the women who were not so lucky and the scars of her lost family and friends. They are never

forgotten, but she is her to tell their story because they live on through her perseverance and through the hope that we learn from this atrocity and never be doomed to repeat it. How can we say the holocaust never happened? Why do we still have so much hatred in our hearts? We seem to have evolved in so many ways, but as a world we have yet to heal hate and come together as one and not have so much division and segregation with our cultures. We have yet to learn to forgive and look without color, hate, sexism, outside traditional gender roles, poverty, social status, economic, status, male and female dominance, sexual orientation, disability, and look at ourselves and remember that in the end we all are born the same way and will die the same way, too. We need to stop making more reasons to divide and find more ways to come together. The last film we saw was Paragraph 175. Its amazing and was sad that such a law was written and left to be obeyed for so long. It upset me because it was something I never learned in any of my textbooks in history class when I was in high school and I was shocked at how something like this could be overlooked. They were people who were killed, arrested and ridiculed based on hearsay and just because they loved differently. We should all be so lucky to have the love of another person be returned. Many of us struggle to find love and these people were ostracized because they felt a certain way and decided to express their affections. The conditions in which they were treated and the awful torture inflicted on them was a test of human strength, because it was not civil at all. We have some of the same struggles today; we judge on some of the same criteria. Like the new immigration laws in Arizona, they are just another means for keeping a group of people in fear while making them feel inferior. We still believe that we have been progressing, but yet it seem we take one step forward and two back and we never catch up.

As a general rule, many of us feel empathy, but we need to start putting ourselves in others shoes to fully understand their plight. We need to practice humility and civility. We need to do some real soul searching and say we are part of the problem but we are only part of the solution. Change does not happen overnight, but silence can be deadly and we need to speak up for those who cant speak up for themselves. We also need to remember those who are gone so that we never forget and we never repeat the same mistakes. We need to be open in all our choices and we need to remember that we are humans and should be seen as equal and given all the same opportunities. We cannot continue this way, we need to unite and be heard and know that change is possible and that we still have many strides to get there. It may be subtle, but we will learn through education and learning to break down the many walls that divide to unify in one sense that we can all live and cohabitate without the fear of oppression. We need to teach our children love, not hate, bigotry and racism. These children are our future, we need to be more responsible for our actions and remember that its the people that make us who we are, not status of any kind.