"I can Hear Them All"

While scrolling through pages and pages of vines taking up my newsfeed on Facebook, one video caught my eye. The video was a commercial for Duracell, the battery company. Derrick Coleman, the focus of the commercial, is
in no way considered to be a "famous" football player. I'm an avid football watcher and I had never heard of the man. He has something that sets him apart from the rest of the athletes seen doing commercials.
 Derrick Coleman, the backup Fullback for the Seattle Seahawks, has been deaf since he was three years old. He played college ball at UCLA, and went un-drafted. Everyone told him to give up, but as he says in the commercial: "I've been deaf since I was three, so I didn't listen". What a GENIUS way to show his determination while reminding the viewer of this seemingly un-conquerable problem. The Seahawks stadium is known for being the loudest in the NFL. This ESPN article explains just how loud CenturyLink Field can become. The only deaf football player happens to play for the loudest team in the world? Call that ironic.
The ad included young Derrick getting picked on in middle school, his hearing-aid falling out during a high school game, and not getting drafted on draft day. The part of this advertisement that was so amazing was the final line: "And now I'm here, with the loudest fans in the NFL cheering me on, and I can hear them all". I've seen this video over 5 times, and I get chills every single time that last line is spoken.

After watching it for the second time, I realized why this commercial was so powerful. Of course it's an incredibly inspiring story, but it goes deeper than just the plot. Not once, during Derricks monologue, did Duracell show their logo and try to advertise during their own commercial. They let Derrick have his part, attract the viewer, and then... BAM: "Trust The  Power Within", Duracell's slogan, pops up on the screen. When a Coke-Cola or Samsung commercial plays, and each of their logos is seen 15 times in a 30 second viewing window, it's overkill. This is the first commercial that I can remember to take this new approach to advertising, and it worked. It's all of my friends favorite commercial, and in my opinion, the best commercial I've ever seen. Check out the video if you want to be inspired.

Superman Sam

Throughout the last two years, I have watched my Rabbi's eight-year-old son Sam Sommer fight an endless battle with cancer. On December 14, 2013, this battle was won by "ninja leukemia" as Rabbi Phyllis Sommer called it in her blog. Although I could write hundreds of blogs depicting inspiring stories of Sammy, I wanted this post to focus on the power of Rabbi Sommer's blog and her other social media platforms. 

For years, Rabbi Phyllis, a person of generation X, has been huge into social media. She was the first leader of the synagogue to have a Facebook, a Twitter account, and her very own blog. Up until about 18 months ago, she used these platforms to expand her reach into the congregational community and to connect with the younger synagogue goers. She used it as a light, spontaneous, easy way to communicate and stay informed about Jewish life in the city and beyond. Once her six year old son was diagnosed, she saw a power in social media that went beyond her prior use. 

A Rabbi of a 950 family congregation dealing with a personal tragedy must have asked herself how to keep people informed without responding to the thousands of emails, calls, and texts she was receiving. She chose to start the Superman Sam blog. In this way, she could tell Sammy's story while expressing her own feelings. This blog went viral. So viral that she started receiving gifts, letters, and prayers from all over the world. Each blog post she wrote was commented on by people she had never met, telling her how brave she and Sam were or sharing their own personal stories of Pediatric Leukemia. 

The blog spurred a lot of emotional connection to the Sommer family, but also an incredibly strong community reaction. Am Shalom members banded together to create meal plans, run activities for Sam's siblings, coordinate special events based on his wish lists (posted on the blog), and even sent the whole Sommer family to Israel and Disney World (twice). All of these actions were inspired by the knowledge gained from the blog. Viral emotion on the internet lead to hundreds of actions on the ground. This could only happen in this age.  On Sammy's funeral weekend, Rabbi Sommer, true to form posted, "need a cake for my Aunt's birthday " to Facebook. 52 cakes showed up at her door within the hour. 

People often bash social media sites for being too addictive, or dangerous. Small Business Chronicle released an article about the negative effects of social media. Author Brian Jung says it creates false connections between people while limiting privacy.  Not to say these aspects of social media don't exist, but there is absolutely another side to the debate. The Sommer family would've gone through this catastrophe alone if it weren't for the blogging and Facebooking Phyllis did. Social media did wonders for this family, and Sammy felt it. During one of his final days, his Mom told him hundreds of people are praying for him right now. He responded "I think it's more like thousands". Social media made Superman Sam the only thing he wanted to be. A world renowned Superhero. 

More Tokenism

The past few weeks in class, we have talked a lot about tokenism in television. Tokenism is the inserting of minority characters in an attempt to create diversity. At the end of friday's class period, I was told the only homework is to think about the world critically while on break. So, I decided to look for tokenism while outside of school.

Being Jewish, during Christmas break there are many times when my friends are celebrating the holiday with their family. During these times, I watch movies. So far this break, I have seen three movies. Elysium, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, and This is the End. While watching all three of these films, I found perfect examples of the different kinds Tokenism we examined in class.

During Elysium, a movie staring Matt Damon in which he is given special strength and assigned to save the world, token characters are most defiantly present. First off, Damon's best bud Julio is hispanic. Julio serves as a "Buddy Character". This is a character that is an under-developed minority due to the lack of screen-time. While Matt's character has many flashbacks to his childhood, Julio's past remains a mystery to the viewers. During these flashbacks, Matt's character becomes complicated, and these flashbacks stir up moral conflict, therefore complicating his character. Julio however, remains a "2-dimensional" character.  Not only does the movie have a buddy character, it also incorporates an "Authority Minority". This token character is the president of the affluent community, and makes no rash decisions. President Patel is a level-headed minority in a position of power making him the "Authority-Minority" of the film.

The second movie I watched was Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. Although I felt this movie was awful, I was interested in the tokenism present during the film. A buddy character is present: a black, half goat half human, best friend of the main, white character Percy Jackson. This was a pretty basic character, not very exciting. The token character that did interest me was the character Tyson: a Cyclops. Tyson also served as a token character, and joined the LONG list of token characters in entertainment to die heroically. Tyson leaps in front of a flying arrow to save Percy, and then falls off a cliff. As we discussed in class, Token characters almost always have heroic deaths, whether or not it fits their personality up to that point.

The last movie I saw this Christmas was This is the End. For the third time. This time, I was able to look at it critically, and saw the movie in a different light. The movie is about 6 famous actors playing themselves while surviving the apocalypse. There are 5 white men, and a black man. The black guy, Craig Robinson, serves as this movies token character. All of the 5 white men have had major roles in many over-lapping films, are are very used to working together. Craig on the other hand, is featured in only one of these films, and plays the body guard to one of the white men. Like the majority of  token characters to come before him, he dies a heroic death, distracting a monster so three of the white men can live.

I'm sure I will continue to watch movies as most of my friends are out of town, and now I know what I'll be looking for in the rest of the movies. Tokenism is present in all aspect of American Media, is very easy to see once you know what to look for.

Oreo=American

While off on the usual 20-minute random tangent my math-class takes, vital information about my math teacher's life was discovered. Turns out my forty-some year-old math teacher has NEVER tried chocolate in his life. My reaction to this was: "Wow, he has incredible self-control. Good for him." My classmates however, did not have the same reaction.


People began to shout at him, asking whether or not he's ever had a brownie, or hot chocolate, or a chocolate chip cookie. He calmly responded to all the chaos by admitting he's never had any of the aforementioned desserts. I thought that would be the end of the discussion. I was wrong. Ben, my seat neighbor who is also in the American Studies class, was the only other one near me who was not intrigued with this newfound fact.


Questions flooded in for the next 10 minutes, with people refusing to believe this seemingly impossible lifestyle existed. One of the senior girls in the front row then proclaimed that "never eating an Oreo is un-American". I guess I was not aware that abstaining from eating 160 calories worth of flour, sugar, cocoa, and corn syrup was "Un-American".

"Un-American" is defined as deviating from American values. This, by the transitive property means that eating unhealthy junk food is an American value. It is sad that being unhealthy has become such a staple in American culture that it is considered an American value. Maybe this is the cause for the 35.7% of American adults that are considered obese according to http://www.cdc.gov. Is it possible that these rates are so high not because people have low self-control, but it has become an American value to eat un-healthily?

Hour of Fun

While procrastinating writing a new blog post, I found an incredible website that one of my Facebook friends had shared. The website is "Hour of Code" and can be found here. Hour of Code is a fun and easy way to teach children the basics of writing computer code. The website is genius. It takes well-known children's characters, such as the Angry Bird and the zombie from Plants vs Zombies to immediately grab the attention of children. Once the Hour of Code has started, videos from famous people such as Bill Gates and Chris Bosh hook the viewer in even more. The purpose of the site is to teach children the basics of computer code by leading recognizable characters through mazes. It is absolutely incredible to think that what used to be an advanced skill only offered in college is now being taught to small children just a few years late. One completes the maze by moving blocks depicting words such as "Move Forward" or "Turn Left" is the correct order so the character can complete the level. My immediate thought is this isn't basic computer science, this is a children's game. But I was WRONG. Between every two or three levels is one of the famous people teaching you about real-world programing applications that are connected to the little blocks. For example, one of the blocks says "Repeat" and all the smaller boxes inside of that box, continue to repeat until the maze is finished. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, tells the viewer that the repeat box is similar to the coding used on Facebook to send out millions of "Happy Birthdays" each day. To the left of the blocks are lines of actual code that each box correlates to. When you put these boxes together and complete the maze, code is written. The boxes get more and more complicated as the game goes on, and after the 20 levels, your Hour of Code is complete. The site then offers more easy ways to learn code. What a genius way to create interest in a field that only continues to grow as people rely more and more on technology: target the youth. Almost 300 million lines of code have been written by students already. The ages listed on the website are ages 6-106, sos if you fall into this age range, you should be okay to try. If you are interested in coding at all, or you love Angry Birds, go check out this nifty website!

21st Century Executions

During my ninth period class, Social Service Board, my peer made a current event presentation on a very disturbing news article. He shared with us an article reporting on the public execution of 80+ people in North Korea. In cities such as Wonsan and Chongjin, people were put to death for minor offenses such as owning a bible and watching South Korean movies while about 10,000 people were forced to watch. The scariest part of this whole endeavor was that my friend who shared the article said it was a very difficult article to find. It made no headlines, and many major news networks such as CNN did not report anything about it. How could such a major story not be ALL over the news? If the execution took place in New York, it would be the headline of every newspaper all over the world.

 I believe the article was so under-reported because if the U.S news released this story and claimed it to be an act of terrorism against North Korea's own people, there would be a huge push by the people to send troops to help these poor civilians. The last thing America needs is to instigate another war after just ending the longest war in American history. On the other hand, if injustice is present in our world, shouldn't the rest of the world, as fellow human beings, do everything possible to ensure justice?

This argument becomes the never-ending argument: Is the U.S the world's police? Since the U.S spends more money on it's military than the rest of the world does combined, should we be the second line of defense for every country? (Mr. Bolos's presentation) How can we sit back while horrible things like this happen to innocent people? These are all questions to think about while reading these horrific executions to inevitably come in the future. 

Hazing: Tradition or Bullying

While scrounging ESPN for interesting articles to read, I found yet another article about hazing. Hazing has been all over the sports news stations recently, so I decided to search the word hazing in the search box on ESPN. I found 13 articles written in the past week regarding hazing, 8 of them in response to the Miami Dolphins story.

In the past few weeks, the sports world has been deeply diagnosing the hazing charges of Miami Dolphins offensive guard Richie Incognito. Jonathan Martin, the victim,  released texts and voice mails left by Incognito on Martin's phone containing racial slurs, homophobic content, and slander of Martin's family. The Dolphins immediately suspended Incognito when the horrifying messages were leaked to the news. Incognito then argued that it was tradition to haze young players. Martin then retaliated by understanding the harassment during his rookie year, but he was no longer a first-year player, and felt he deserved his teammates respect. When the problem was reported to the rest of the Dolphins, the overwhelming majority took Incognito's side. They too argued that his incident was tradition, not bullying. While looking at some of the other articles on ESPN, and researching other cases, the argument of tradition vs. bullying almost always comes up. 

While reading all of these articles, I began to think about my older brother, who is currently in the fraternity Theta Chi and the University of Michigan. College fraternities are often associated with hazing as well. In an interview with an anonymous fraternity brother conducted by Cornell University, the tradition argument came up again. He says fraternities haze in order to "Mold good brothers", learn "responsibilities" and to "create links to past generations" (A defense of Hazing-Cornell). The student's entire interview can be found here.  If fraternities use it to create a sense of brotherhood, can sports teams use it for the same function?

I believe that hazing can be successfully incorporated into professional sports. Although some athletes cross the line between hazing and bullying, hazing is a tradition, and should continue to be allowed in sports. Do you agree?