20. April 2010 by student.

Suicide has become a dangerous national problem among college students. Why would a student want to end their life this early? Suicide has been proven to be the second leading cause of death among college students. Research shows that ninety percent of college students who take their own lives have a diagnosable mental illness, usually depression. However, even though depression is easily treatable, people usually go on without seeking help. Why is this? Too often students fail to recognize they have a mental issue and too often they do not know how or where to seek help.There are five common stressors that usually affect the average college student. The one that affects college students the most is finances. Academics is next, followed by time management, roommate conflicts, and the stress of relationships. As a college student, I too have to face and worry about these top stressors, and would have to agree that financial problems is at top the list. “Few students can afford to pay for college without some form of education financing. Academics being the second largest stressor shouldn’t shock anyone. The fact remains that more and more students are entering college. College students at universities across the country are entering school with higher GPAs and test scores than ever before. This has lead to increased competition in the classroom. Parents are putting pressure on their children to do well in college in order to obtain well-paying jobs after graduation.  In Addition to this, students still have to balance all other activities while managing an increasing course load. This leads to quite a bit of stress. Students who have academic requirements for scholarships, clubs, jobs, or teams, are always carrying around a big ball of stress in the form of their academics.Time Management, now more than ever, is the third largest stressor. Students are becoming more involved with their universities. Students go to athletic events, parties, and class; they are members of clubs and teams; many rush for fraternities and sororities; and most students have jobs. Time is a huge stressor for many students. So many students lose sleep or feel as if they just don’t have enough time to accomplish what they need to accomplish. Managing time can be quite difficult for anyone as busy as the modern day college student.Roommate conflicts, we’ve all heard the horror stories of the dreadful roommate. Unfortunately, these stories often turn out to be true.Last but not least relationships, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been to college. Many relationships start and or end during our college years. Those who are in relationships have to deal with the stress of arguments, jealousy, not being able to see each other enough, and those difficult long-distance relationships.Time and finances always seem limited in college, and it leads to stress. If you simply manage them both, it won’t be as stressful. For time, make use of date books, calendars, planners, and anything else you need. Don’t over-stretch yourself and make time for relaxing, eating, and sleeping.

Remember if you are feeling stressed there are plenty of people who feel the same way and would love to help you.

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20. April 2010 by student.

After September eleventh Americans asked politicians how could they help heal our country and their response was “go shopping”. Americans also wondered how they could reduce our dependence on oil and our leaders told us to drive and fly. Overlooking one of the richest nations we are starting to see debt piling up. In concern to this problem our leaders offer tax cuts, forty percent of those cuts have gone to the richest one percent of Americans.Our politicians and merchants seem not to notice and common wealth. In our nation these habits have become repetitive to the average household; if the streets are unsafe they buy and alarm system, move into a gated community, or pack a gun. When the public schools start to fall they put their children in private schools. If the water is polluted, they buy their own supplies in bottles. Instead of trying to reduce crime, trying to figure out and fix the school systems, or work to clean up the water system. The commercial appeal urges us to grab whatever we can, without concern of future generations or that we live on a planet with millions of other species. While the world wastes away we are advised to buy our way to security. In America today the dominant one is a self-centered fantasy that leads to loneliness. We need a new story, rather than defining us as consumers we should be defined as conservers. We need to simply become aware to the real resources of the good life. What are being sold to us every day as the “American way of life” is mostly a cheat and a lie. Endless consumption, endless novelty, and endless pay is what we live for. It is simply horrible for us and everything around us. In this society obsessed with competition, we need to say why we practice cooperation. In spite of what the media has to say, the good life is not for sale! The good life is something we make of it together, and with everything surrounding us.We have no concern as Americans as to what really is a huge problem. It’s true that our nation’s debt is piling up, and they still try to convince people to go out and shop to help our economy, but what about our debt? Why try to fix one problem and add on to create another. Our society turning more towards commodities to find happiness has never thought about future generations to come. We indulge our appetites without regard for the needs of our community, and without gratitude to the people whose labor supports us. To think how twisted our government is to offer help and give tax cuts but then forty percent of the cuts go to the wealthier people who already have more money than they know what to do with. Our politicians and merchants seem to not notice that we hold any wealth in common. It to the point that it’s like we are practically brain washed. If a problem comes to us we look for a way to overlook it and buy a way to get rid or ignore it. Never will you see a person try to fix it or look more into the problem to resolve it. I feel like being reliant to our commodities has become a habit. To create wise and loving communities it begins with cherishing our common wealth. When saying common wealth I mean national parks, wilderness areas, museums, and libraries something that you are not able to find for sale at the mall and will not see advertised on TV.

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20. April 2010 by student.

Besides in the classroom you see many other areas that are affected by people acting irresponsibly and taking the easy way out. The area that this affects the most is the workplace. People seem to carry their traits used with school work into the workplace. I can tell by just knowing someone if they would be a good quality worker. It’s hard to realize what being lazy could affect. But it seems to be very common in my generation and I believe that comes from the parents doing everything for their children. A person, who has had a parent by their side, helping with everything, is not going to be the first one to try and complete everything to their best.            Behavior from the home it brought to the classroom and everything brought to the classroom is illustrated in the workplace. Taking the easy way out at your job can lead to many problems, even if you can’t see it at the time. For example working at a retail store processing a check at the register involves many steps. The steps seem very pointless and annoying but they all have a purpose. People tend to skip steps during the scanning process because it asks multiple times. But when skipped a step it will not fully get the information from the account, and the merchandise will become unpaid for.             Even simple things like not following the correct way of folding the clothes. The store is audited every week and will get a low score when things are not the way it is suppose to be. When the score is low it will come back to the manager and from there the manager will get in trouble for not showing you the right way to do it, when they actually have you just choose not to follow it. By telling you this it is just a way of showing little things just add on to the next thing. The little things also can affect other people, now that a manager got in trouble when they did show you the right way but also now someone will have to do your work over that you decided not to do correct.             Going back to what goes on in a household will be carried on into their later life. Children know while growing up that if they don’t do something correct their parents will fix it. If my mom tells me to clean my room multiple times and I don’t, she will do it. If don’t set the table she will, if I messed up on anything your parents will be there to help fix it. This is a wonderful thing to have but later on it not a good thing. You hear how years ago many children had lots of household chores and would have to walk to school. If you tell kids now to bring out the trash they look at you like you have five heads. I believe it definitely is involving the newer generations and is worse to come.  

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20. April 2010 by student.

Around this time eight years ago on September 11, 2001 changed our country. This war has brought so many difficulties here to all the Americans. When this war was brought upon I felt it was necessary now I just wish it would end. It has brought problems to all of the families here in America. They are problems to worry about every day. Since the war has started all of the things linked have brought the economy to a down fall.

                The gas prices which have risen drastically have created people to not travel as much. When people reduce the amount of oil bought, it affects the economy significantly in a negative way. When people do not travel by car because of gas prices they travel by plane which prices have also increased. The housing value has dropped which has put the market into huge problems.

                The amount of unemployed people is also drastically increasing. The unemployment rate has gone up very quickly in the past couple years. The owners of farm land are also suffering from this downfall of the economy. The farmers are unable to afford the supplies and necessities to maintain the farm land. Farmers are not able to supply a large amount of produce and crops, leads to a limited amount of these products which once again will raise the prices of the products.

                Since the economic fall the cost of education has gone up, so now not as many people are able to obtain the type of education wanted. In grade schools they are cutting back on certain programs. Programs pertaining to music, athletics, and arts which are things that would raise the cost of the grade school education. Having this taken away doesn’t give the opportunity for the students to get these types of experiences. The war was brought upon with good reasoning but now has just lead to uncertainties. I wish they could just put it to an end.

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20. April 2010 by student.

Teen pregnancy is one of the most difficult experiences a young person might ever face when it interrupts school or other plans. It can create an emotional crisis resulting in feelings of shame and fear, and it may appear that you will crumble under pressures in your environment. The stress of how you are going to break this news to your parents might be even greater, and finding help may seem an impossible task. The groups that are being affected by this social problems are teens. Pregnancy with other age groups are the not the problem. It is the teens who are dropping out of school or not continuing to college.The lack of education on safe sex, be it from parents, schools, or otherwise, is a cause of teenage pregnancy. Many teenagers are not taught about methods of birth control and how to deal with peers who pressure them into having sex before they are ready. The in-take of drugs, alcohol etc contributes a lot to teenage pregnancy meanwhile as a teenager you may not be ready for sexual intercourse at that moment but being intoxicated with drugs and alcohol makes you to be involved in unintended sexual activity just because sex at that time is less emotionally painful and embarrassing. Some facts of the social problem are, 56% of young women and 73% of young men today have had intercourse by age 18, compared with 35% of young women and 55% of young men in the early 1970s. One in 5 youth do not have intercourse before the age of 20. More than 40 percent of women in the U.S. become pregnant before they reach 20 years of age. This goes to show how teen pregnancy is becoming a huge problem. Teens are unable to pursue with a higher level of education and are not giving these children a family environment. From research I have found these are the three solutions that they believe will be the most effective. The first is an abstinence-only approach, which has not been shown to be as effective as the others. Teens tend to experiment with sexual activity no matter what. The second is comprehensive health education or sexuality education that includes information on contraception; this may delay sexual initiation and increase contraceptive use. Finally, youth development programs that include sex education along with other activities are associated with delayed first sex and lower teenage pregnancy rates. By educating these teens of how many different types of birth control they can choose from or educating them on STD’s possibly they would think twice before having sex. I think there should be a class in high school that is strictly about sex education and should be mandatory to pass high school. From what I remember the only time I had a sex education class was when I was in fifth grade. In fifth grade you do not take the sex education presentation serious, fifth graders just laugh and say gross. In the elementary age I believe is too young to education on this type of thing. Approximately 80% of all teenage parents who drop out of school never return. Teenage mothers have half the lifetime earnings of women who postpone having children until age 20. Teen mothers are high in developing complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Many problems result from poor or no prenatal care. Babies born to teen mothers are at high risk of being too small. Low birth weight is associated with increased infant mortality, illness, and handicapping conditions. Each year more than 60 of every 1,000 teen girls will deliver a baby. This factors out abortions and miscarriages. Our society pays billions. Almost 40 billion dollars per year go out in welfare and Medicaid funds due to teenage pregnancy and births. Three quarters of teen parents will receive welfare payments within 5 years of their first birth. Children born to teen moms are sicker, poorer, and less educated as a group than those born to parents in their 20’s. The health problems range from infant death, to cerebral palsy, to dyslexia, to hyperactivity disorder, and respiratory problems. These same children tend to have more behavioral problems because they are raised by teens that frequently lack the ability to master parenting skills. The scariest part of all is that they are the most likely group to become teen parents and repeat the cycle.

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20. April 2010 by student.

Rolling stones had signed on two forestry projects in Scotland which would plant 2,800 trees, for every 60 fans. This would render our carbon neutral. Extra cost was covered by a phone company which made it 20 cents a ticket. What would it mean to apply in our daily lives, the kind of reductions called the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse –gas emissions? Would emission join low-carb diets? At Oxford University recently proposed demolishing 80,000 inefficient homes a year to achieve the British goal of a 60 % reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. In Switzerland technicians set out to wrap part of a glacier in insulating foam. Die-hard Alaskan anti-environmentalists have begun to warm up to the idea of imposing on green-house emissions because homes are beginning to slip into rising sea. Recently reported 180 Alaskan villages threatened because of melting sea ice and permafrost, moving one of them would cost tax payers $180 million.            Kyoto Protocol limitations are too expensive, and to difficult. With manufacturing processes DuPont says it has already cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by 72% from 1991 levels, other than 33% increase in production. Calculating greenhouse-gas emissions turns out to be dismayingly complex. Sitting home on a winter night after my son has taken my car out for a useless errand I thought to write down the mileage to see the coast of the trip he just took but knew it would just be a waste of time because he would not believe me. Every time my car burns a gallon of gasoline I am putting more than 25 pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.            Gasoline and jet fuel are about 90 percent of carbon. CO2 will linger for hundreds of even thousands of years, helping to trap solar heat and turn the atmosphere into a greenhouse.  Jeff Dukes computed that a single gallon of gasoline requires about 196, 00 pounds of primeval plant and animal matter. Researchers treat fuel from current plant growth as causing zero net greenhouse- gas emissions. Problems arise when you alter this “natural” balance, Dukes found that in 1997 human population burned the equivalent of more than 400 times the total plant matter grown in a year. In 2005 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 380 parts per million, is a third higher than in preindustrial times. Roughly 33 percent of the American production of all greenhouse gases, or the equivalent of 17,422 pounds of CO2 per person, comes from sources under our direct control- our cars and houses. A typical household adds more than 2,000 pounds a month of CO2 in the atmosphere. If everyone started worrying about global warming there would not be enough green electricity to go around.

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20. April 2010 by student.

Underage consumption of alcohol is not a social problem, the effects of alcoholism on society is. It is as though the government has kept the legal drinking age to those persons 21 an older, is only to limit the availability to society. There are plenty of different methods in which underage persons will obtain alcohol. Is there any symbolic value for the United States of America with the drinking age at 21? Are we trying to give this illusion that we are greater, more civil or just showing the rest of the world how passive the younger generations are. We will allow the government to make any man when they turn 18 register with the Selective Service System, with the possibility of put in active duty and die for the country they love, the “Land of the free, and home of the brave”, yet they can not “legally” consume alcohol, this is not freedom. The theory some have proposed is that the government keeps the age at 21 to prevent alcohol from reaching High School students. The students while at home would have parental supervision and be under a closer watch by those who theoretically love them and have raised them. This responsibility that can be learned on a small scale will be able to be a building block for those who move out either going to collage or becoming independent. Either place that persons end up once away from home have an extreme likelihood for alcohol to be assessable. When alcohol is available yet still be illegal this can also pose a huge risk, now not only are persons going to “crazy” and participate in binge drinking, but also be afraid to get medical attention if some injury would occur while intoxicated. The alcohol related incidents for residents living on campus at FGCU who are under 21 typically result in a 1-2 page paper on how wise decision making was not used the night of the first offense, and a 2-3 page paper comparing and contrasting wither the drinking age should be lowered on the second offense. Underage consumption of alcohol is not a social problem, by looking at the consequences that come from said offense, it is expected from collage students, if not this punishment would be harsher.

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20. April 2010 by student.

Have you ever wondered how circus animals learned how to do their tricks? They just aren’t born to do them. Circus animals are cruelly taught to do these tricks. Bull hooks are usually driven into elephant’s sensitive skin to make them cooperate. Electric shocks, whips, baseball bats, and pipes are also used to get the animals to cooperate. Some animals are kept muzzled so they can’t defend themselves when being “trained.” Some animals are drugged to make them manageable and others teeth are removed to keep danger threats low. Some bears have had their front paws burned so they will stand on their back legs. The living conditions of these animals are bad, too. They are kept in small, enclosed places where they have to eat, sleep, and defecate in the same place. Circuses travel to areas where water is limited so they have a limited amount of water to clean their stalls, the animals themselves, and drinking water for the animals. Elephants are kept with their feet chained down for long periods of time and baby elephants are prematurely taken from their mothers for training purposes. They keep the baby elephants tied up by ropes which leads to rope burn. The circus animal’s diets don’t consist of what they would generally eat in the wild and they are usually underfed so they have a good performance. Disease is also common among circus animals since a veterinarian isn’t always available. The combination of living conditions and training, circus animals usually have a lot of mental distress which leads to animal attacks. When the animals are no long useful to the circus, they are usually permanently caged, sold to a game farm to be hunted, or sold to labs. Most people don’t realize the sacrifices of these animals for their entertainment.

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20. April 2010 by student.

It’s probably not a shock to hear America is one of the largest consumers worldwide, and the amount of waste we create is surprising. I was asked to consider how much waste I personally create in a week, recently. Between my four roommates, we create about two trash bags brimming full of trash a week. I considered this against a mildly larger scale; I noticed that by the end of the week, the trash compressor by my dorm is completely filled, at that point, people literally throw their trash next to the trash compressor. For an area of about 240 people (assuming no one outside of a comfortable walking distance uses the same compactor I use), I think that is a considerable amount of waste. Now consider where all of that trash goes, weekly? Most U.S. municipal solid waste goes to sanitary landfills. Landfills are considered sanitary if they are covered with soil or clay, and have leachate collection systems to help protect ground water. The problem with landfills, aside from the cost factor of compacting the waste and keeping the area moderately sanitary, is that landfills take up space. Landfills pose the environmental issues of possible groundwater contamination or the leakage of methane and hydrogen sulfide, because of these conditions nothing can be built on or around them, let alone live or thrive on them. To give an idea about how much space landfills consume, there is New York City’s largest landfill, Fresh Kills. Fresh Kills is located on Staten Island on an ecologically sensitive wetland and adjacent of residential communities. It is 3000 acres of trash, the four mounds in which trash has been piled onto for around 50 years are each 70 meters high, each taller than the statue of liberty.

                Another method America has attempted is incineration. This is a highly effective method of managing waste; it is the quickest way to reduce waste volume. 90% of the waste is incinerated and the ashes are buried in landfills. The trouble here lies in, again, money and pollution. Incinerating trash releases a full scale of toxins, from Arsenic to zinc, along with gases such as monoxide and sulfur dioxide. Electrostatic precipitators and filters can be made to reduce the amount of toxins emitted, but this makes municipal incinerators significantly more expensive. This method of waste management was originally halted by the Clean Air act of 1970. The last method known, which seem to be everyone’s favorite, is recycling. Despite the little bit of energy required to melt down the materials, this method is significantly cheaper and it also has the least amount of an impact on the environment. Aluminum cans can be melted down into new cans as well as glass being broken down into new bottles. Tries are shredded and turned into playground equipment or rubberized road surface. Plastic can also be used for playground equipment, or it can be converted into fiber for carpeting and insulation for clothing. People also collect debris in their yard to recycle.  Yard waste alone accounts for 15% of municipal waste, but when recycled, it can be turned into composite used to make materials such as plywood.

Methods of waste reduction exist as well. Source reduction is a method by which less trash is produced in the first place. Most people have probably seen an example of this on their very flimsy water bottles. I always see bottles that advertise that there is 70% less plastic used in creating the bottle.  These advertisements can also be seen on aluminum cans, but is used in reducing materials used in many forms of packaging. Bio-degradable packaging is also an option to help reduce the amount of waste cluttering this world. Granted, the items may take a while to bio-degrade, they will not remain in a landfill for centuries such as plastic bottles and Styrofoam will. Materials such as paper and cotton will break down in two to five months while aluminum and tin may take anywhere from fifty to one hundred years to biodegrade.  Surely a pile full of items made to biodegrade in a matter of months would be a better landfill option than aluminum, Styrofoam and plastic. There are companies such as Natur Tec that produce forms of biodegradable packaging, bags and utensils that can be bought on line and distributed out through companies. Among the most obvious options amount waste reductions would be reusing daily items. Utensils, napkins, I’ve even heard of re-usable diapers, they are all options to help reduce waste.

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20. April 2010 by student.

For a month Jaime Oliver has been in Huntington, West Virginia trying to reshape the way the city eats.   According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The Associated Press, Huntington is one of the unhealthiest and most obese cities in the U.S.  Huntington also has extremely high rates of heart disease and diabetes. But this is reflective of our nation; the U.S. is slowly becoming one of the most obese countries in the world.  It is sad that for the first time in history, children’s life spans are predicted to be less than their parents.  Yet when someone like Jaime Oliver tries to make a difference, some people have a problem because they don’t want a foreigner to “tell them what to do.”

Rod Willis, one of Huntington’s radio DJs, and Alice Gue, the head lunch lady at the elementary school Oliver has been working with, are two of the main opponents of the Food Revolution in Huntington.  Most people against Oliver’s work are opposed because they think the school lunch system is working fine the way it is and, like I mentioned earlier, they don’t want a foreigner telling us Americans what to eat.  

But how is a system that considers french fries a serving of vegetables a good lunch system?  There must be a reason that more than 9 million American children are overweight, and the school’s lunch menus is definitely one of them.  Students eat almost a fourth of their meals at school, so the food needs to be nutritious.  If parents saw what their kids are eating at school, they would be outraged. How can reheated pizza be a whole-hearted and healthy breakfast, the meal that is the most important of the day? 

For those people who think Oliver’s an arrogant Brit, well maybe they’re right.  But if his system works, as it has in the past, then the product clearly outweighs the cost.  In London, Oliver implemented a healthy school lunch program in middle schools in 2004. Since then, researchers say that excused absences have dropped by 15%, which means fewer kids are getting sick, scores on standardized tests have increased, and overall participation in the lunch program has increased.       

Overall, what Oliver is doing could truly be the beginning of the Food Revolution America so badly needs.  If we want to save our nations future from heart disease and diabetes, something must be done.

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