To ponder

So after thinking about this all week, reading over everyone’s blog entries that are up at least once (sometimes twice), fretting, procrastinating the actual writing part of it partly due to a fear of failure, here is my long awaited blog entry:

The power elite are the people who hold the top positions in the main institutions – economy, government, military, school, religion, and the media – that shape the society in which we live. (or at least that is what I gathered from Principles of Sociology) Yet Domhoff suggests “the upper class, corporate community, and policy-planning network have been defined and described, it is possible to discuss the leadership group that I call the ‘power elite.’ I define the power elite as the leadership group of the upper class.” Anyway you look at it, it seems that the ruling class are from a different world than us. They have degrees from Harvard and wealthy parents who may them themselves be from the ruling class. The vast majority of the people in the ruling class were born into it. We can see examples of this from our own Senator Rockefeller all the way up to George W. Bush. Donald Trump’s daughter clearly has an advantage. While there may be the rare Abraham Lincoln or Bill Gates, the majority of the ruling class had some sort of an unordinary advantage that helped them get there (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/who.html).

It is much easier to get people to accept something if “that is just the way it is.” It is easier to wage war against crazies or terrorists than to justify a war over possession of vital economic goods which Klare foresees as being the reason for conflicts in the future. How convenient that there may just be oil there!

Sadly, I must admit that everything I know is filtered through some source or another – television, newspapers, radio. I have never gone to Iraq or Iran, Africa, the Caspian Sea, ect., and I probably will never be able to. However, perhaps, this course will get us thinking about where the information we receiving is coming from, what their position is, and if they have any ulterior motives. Maybe, we will learn to actively listen to the “knowledge” we hear and choose for ourselves what we will believe. Hopefully, we will discover our own sociological imagination that Mills talks about and use it to realize how we and the events around us fit into the bigger picture. In fact, I believe these three things are an integral part of the goal of this course. By being able to analyze information and discern the motives of all parties we will be able to understand the true reason for conflict. Developing a sociological imagination may help us understand ways to bring about peace. Understanding who is in power and what they are after will help enlighten us to understand why we are in these conflicts.