As we have been studying this semester, there have been a number of issues that are related to American Society and to Global society as a whole.
First I want to look at the issue of the war in Iraq in context of the very first Chapter in the book that I looked at. The war is increasingly becoming something where people don’t know exactly what we are fighting for anymore. Durkheim, as the book points out would argue that the war promotes group and national identity even if it involves human tragedy. As a Functionalist, Durkheim saw Society as a machine in which each part is imperative to the operation of the whole. If one part breaks down so does the rest. So what about that war? It would seem that the support for it and the rationale behind it is stretched in two directions, one side opposing and the other supporting. So what does that do for our society? If you look at this from a perspective that is functionalist, it should be breaking our society down. And perhaps it is doing just that.
Next I would like to look at Chapter 4, the one that looked at socialization, and where I focused on the peer group as an area of socialization that is incredibly important to development. That being said, bullying is an issue in our society that seems to have gotten a lot more attention in recent days, and not just the kind where one child will take another’s lunch money, but the problem of girls bullying others through relational aggression. There are many organizations that are fighting against bullying, some, such as stopbullying.gov, are even government funded sites. Books like Queen Bees and Wannabees are drawing attention to the fact that there are clear reasons why many girls bully others and try to manipulate them. Whatever the reason, it is a key factor in some girls socialization and it needs to be monitored and stopped if there are to be less girls who could have high self-esteem who now have decidedly low self esteem instead.
The next chapter I looked at was chapter 11, where socialization was looked at in the terms of gender and gender roles. The book contends that gender is a social construct. My question, then, is why is it so difficult for us to get over these perceived differences and gender “boxing”? An ongoing issue has always been discrimination of women in the workforce. For some reason our society and many others around the globe have decided that for some reason the “fairer sex” cannot possibly be as valuable to a profession as a man can. Much has been happening to battle this wage fight and fight for the right treatment of women in the workplace, but, if this chapter still needs to be in a textbook, it is quite obvious that the battle is far from over.
Finally, the Fifth chapter in the book was the last one I focused on. This chapter focuses on different types of societies and from this I became interested in the society of the United States as both Gemeinschaft and Gelleschaft. There was one small comment at the bottom of the section on these two terms that talked about unity in diversity and how that ideal, though stated as the “motto” of the United States, is far from where we actually are. Issues of racism, sexism, and clashes between political views, and religious views seem to tear e pluribus unum apart and not really give it much of a chance. Will America ever be able to be truly unified? I think there are certain events in history that have brought the nation together, however there are just as many that have torn it apart.
Untimely, sociology helps me look at society in a critical way and wonder just what needs to be done to knock down those walls that create the issues in society, and it causes me to wonder if that will be possible someday.
