Chapter 14

And the end of this class. Well, time has certainly flown. Possibly away with my sanity, but that is fine. Or due to other things.
     Anyway, on to the assignment.
     One of the things that jumped in my face while doing readings and thinking about these issues is that they are rather impossible to seperate out from each other completely. If you are going to look at things in a cause and effect manner. Or like everything is a spiderweb, it is all conected.
      Deviance is one of the things that was intesting to read about. That deviance was in the eye of the beholder, rather than in the laws that regulate such things was very interesting. That right and wrong are created by the society that we live in, and that those rules are subject to change. Then of course there needs to be a norm, which is then broken, and then someone must react to the norm being broken.
     When I first learned about the American Revolution, two things that came out of it stood out, freedom of religion, and the idea that people were innocent until proven guilty. But evidently people are rather willing to jump to conclusions about people, before they have had a trial. And that can make finding an imartial jury to be rather hard. Especially if it is a well publized case. People seem to want to be able to put a label on anything, as soon as they find it, and then not change their opinion, or the label that they have placed on someone else, no matter what happens after that.
     Now even definitions of words change. And first impressions are normally not the best impressions people are going to get. So the idea that judgements get made that quickly, is interesting. I think that I did know that, but it was not a very consious thing. Now it is something that I think about quite a bit more. Along with what people consider to be deviant behavior, and why it is considered to be deviant. I have heard that drugs are bad frequently, and that alcohol and tabacco are not good either, especially for people who are under the age limit for those things. But there are still people who do those things. It brings up the question of, are the rules and norms making it so that people want to break them, instead of following them? And why do people make those deviances into laws?