When it comes to learning, nothing beats an actual lived experience. Check out an example from each chapter. Chapter 1 Taking a New Look at Social Problems "I wish corporate executives could see all the faces of these people they're downsizing. I wish they could see them shopping for food and putting their kids to bed. All they seem to care about is the bottom line. And therefore all of us are nothing but Social Security numbers. (Kleinfeld, 1996:A9-10) - Laura, a 29 year old vice-president at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York who has experienced corporate downsizing. Chapter 2 Wealth and Poverty "I'd like to be able to fix the kids' rooms up nice and I haven't been able to. And if I do have the money, it's always something else that comes up...It's so frustrating when you're trying to lead a normal life, but you can't do it. And then I was trying to think, "Well, if I get this in this month. If I can take so much out of this from the savings account..." There was a time where I could have done that, but now I'm down so low that I didn't have anything. I got paid and that week it was gone. It was all gone. So it was hard. I had to resort to borrowing." Quoted in Rank (1994:53) - Joyce Mills Chapter 3 Racial and Ethnic Inequality "We are unable to get taxis to pick us up in front of office buildings. We are frisked and detained on suburban commuter trains. We are watched in department stores and mistaken for coat-check clerks and restroom attendants while lunching in the best restaurants. We are directed to freight elevators and delivery windows by receptionists who fail to recognize us in our own company offices. We are black professionals in corporate America in the 1990s. Although I am at my desk each morning facing the same corporate challenges as my white co-workers, a great deal of my job-related stress comes from sources totally unrelated to my job... The amount of subtle bias I face as a lawyer continues to dismay me. For example, I have worked with clients or co-counsel who have become comfortable with me through phone conversations and correspondence. But upon meeting me, they are suddenly fidgety and wary of my competence. "Where did you go to law school?" they ask almost immediately. Unable to focus on anything else until they hear "Harvard," these clients rarely say, "I pay that firm a lot of money. How come they gave me a black lawyer?" But they do practice more subtle, and ultimately more damaging, discrimination. The client, for example, may phrase his immediate dissatisfaction at being assigned to a black as a complaint that is vague yet incriminating ("I don't feel very comfortable working with Larry") or, worse, may complain about my skills ("I don't think Larry is up to the job, so assign me another lawyer"). In both cases, the forthright employer is left thinking there is no bias, and the black employee is left without a client, but with an abiding sense of failure and anger." (Graham, 1995:F13) -Lawrence Otis Graham, a corporate lawyer and author, describing the experiences of many middle and upper-middle class African Americans in "corporate America." Chapter 4 Gender Inequality "The prevailing attitude towards women was demonstrated on the first day of classes by my anatomy instructor, who remarked that the elderly cadaver "must have been a Playboy bunny" before instructing us to cut off her large breasts and toss them into the thirty-gallon trash can marked "Cadaver waste." Barely hours into our training, we were already being taught that there was nothing to learn from examining breasts. Given the fact that one out of nine American women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, to treat breasts as extraneous tissue seemed an appalling waste of an educational opportunity, as well as a not-so-subtle message about the relative importance of body parts. My classmates learned their lesson of disrespect well. Later in the year one carved a tick-tack-toe on a female cadaver and challenged others to play." - Adriane Fugh-Berman, a graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, describes how some medical students often learn demeaning attitudes towards women. Chapter 5 Inequality Based on Age "A teacher saw my picture [in a newspaper article about ninety-year-olds] in USA Today and had her class write to me. I got thirty lovely letters....I've never been to the South, so I flew [to Decatur, Alabama]...I answer any of their questions. Do you still have your own teeth? Do you have a boyfriend? I say, "No, but I'm looking for one who can cook. If you find somebody like that, let me know." They think it's funny. They want to know how it feels to be ninety. I tell them I feel like myself. Don't you all feel like yourself? Okay, there's a difference. When I was your age, I loved to play basketball and climb mountains and slide down the other side. One thing I didn't want to do was make speeches.. It was scary. Now I don't want to climb mountains and play basketball. I love to make speeches. So you see, when you're ninety, you'll do what you feel like doing. In a way, I'm telling them to value old age and respect it." - Hazel Wolf, age 95, Seattle, Washington, in an interview with author Studs Terkel (1996:140) Chapter 6 Inequality Based on Sexual Orientation "I've been punched, kicked; I've been urinated on; I've been spit on; I've had things thrown at me...Being urinated on, I think is the most humiliating experience that I've ever had happen in my life, and I felt worse than an animal. I mean, it was just so degrading and so humiliating. (Terry, 1996: A8) - Jamie Nabozny describes harassment he received from other students because of his sexual orientation. Chapter 7 Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry "I was a minister's daughter. As far as I was concerned, prostitution was the last thing in the entire world I would think of...Then I met my man. That's how I got into it... They meet you. They're nice to you. they take you out. It's like you think you're meeting a normal guy and falling in love... Some of them, they tell you right up front that you have to work for them. My man told me after two weeks. He said he cared for me, he liked me, and he felt deeply, but this is what he does and the only way I could be with him is by coming out here and working. He drove me around here. He said, 'See those girls? They have furs, diamonds, houses. They have everything." I fell for it. My first day, I made $100. One hundred dollars! I couldn't believe it! After a while, you're not thinking about the sex. There's no intimacy. You don't [care] about your date. If he dropped dead, fine. Just leave your wallet behind." (Kasindorf, 1988:56) - Nadia, a 19 year old prostitute in New York City. Chapter 8 Alcohol and Other Drugs "I knew I had hit a person... You don't have to be legally intoxicated to be dangerous. I used to think drunk drivers were guys who were alcoholics and staggered into their car. I know now that they are kids and adults like myself... When I got into my car [after leaving the bar]... it never occurred to me at any time that I was intoxicated. I didn't stumble. I wasn't sick. I started the car easily. Nothing indicated to me that I was not in control... That's the danger of so-called social drinking. How can you judge that you are intoxicated when your judgment is already impaired? Just a little alcohol can do it." - Cesilee Hyde, age 23, describes the night in 1995 that her car stuck and killed a police officer directing traffic at an accident site (quoted in Banta, 1996: A1). Chapter 9 Crime and Criminal Justice "A bunch of us were sitting on the curb on our block, shooting the breeze, when the ice cream man drove up the street...The ice cream man rang his bell and stopped half a block from us as excited young children ran outdoors, flailing their arms... There was no special plan. We just got up, drifted on over, and studied the scene. The ice cream man was so busy serving children that he didn't notice us surrounding him. While the fellas stood in back, watching the man go in and out of the freezer, I walked to the front of the truck and peeked inside the cab... I noticed he'd left the engine running. I quietly opened the door and slipped inside, then stomped the accelerator and pulled away. As I drove down the street, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the shocked ice cream man standing in the middle of the street, holding Popsicles in each hand." - Journalist Nathan McCall remembers the day that he and other members of his gang stole an ice cream truck. (McCall, 1994:87-88) Chapter 10 Violence "I relive my grief every time a child gets killed. It doesn't get a chance to heal. Your wounds. Your hurt. Your grief. It leaves a hole in your soul... In their deaths there is sorrow, but there is also some unbelievable joy. If I had not had my three sons I would not be the type of person I am today. They help me be strong. They help me not to be selfish. It's not about me anymore. Society wants us to believe that our children died because they did something wrong. That's not true. there's single mothers who are single not by choice, but we still love our children." (Gonzalez, 1995:A16) - Frances Davis, describing the loss of three sons in six years to gunfire in Brooklyn, NY. Chapter 11 Health Care "I am a very different person now: more open, much more honest, and more self-knowing...I turned it [cancer] into a possibility of opening up to myself, of discovering, and for exploring new areas. I've realized that I want to list the ways in which cancer can do that. You can get courage to take larger risks than you ever have before. I mean, you're already sick, so what can happen to you? You can have much more courage in saying things and in living than you ever had before...And you can do the things you've always wanted to do. Cancer, by giving you the sense of your own mortality, can entice you into doing those things you've been postponing...You have this sense of urgency. And you can turn this urgency-you can harness this energy that propels you-so that you go ahead and do these things and discover new parts of yourself...Cancer has put me in touch with that. And then also, it has taught me to enjoy the tenderness and the preciousness of every moment. Moments are very important because there may not be any after that-or you may throw up. Cancer exquisitely places you in the moment. I have become very human to myself in a way that I never would have imagined. I've become a bigger person, a fuller person. This to me is one of the greatest lessons: just being human. Having cancer doesn't mean that you lose yourself at all. For me it meant that I discovered myself. Chapter 12 The Changing Family "I was working from six-thirty in the morning to seven at night without breaks. I wasn't eating. I was irritable. I couldn't deal with anybody. I was fighting with my wife all the time. We were breaking apart. I wasn't communicating anymore. The job took control of me. I was possessed. I didn't feel patient with my daughter anymore. It was taking a big toll on me, and I didn't like it at all. I decided it wasn't worth it and the only way to stop was to leave." (Gerson, 1993: 145) - Ernie, a physical therapist, explaining why he resigned from a managerial position in a large corporation when he discovered his job was damaging his family relationships. Chapter 13 Problems in Education "One fateful day, in the second grade, my teacher decided to teach her class more efficiently by dividing it into six groups of five students each. Each group was assigned a geometric symbol to differentiate it from the others. There were the Circles. There were the squares. There were the Triangles and Rectangles. I remember being a hexagon. I remember something else, an odd coincidence. The Hexagons were the smartest kids in the class. These distinctions are not lost on a child of seven...Even in the second grade, my classmates and I knew who was smarter than whom. And on the day on which we were assigned our respective shapes, we knew that our teacher knew, too...We knew also that, along with our geometric shapes, our books were different and that each group had different amounts of work to do...Not surprisingly, the Hexagons had the most difficult books of all, those with the biggest words and the fewest pictures, and we were expected to read the most pages...What I had been exposed to, and in truth had benefited from, in that dusty elementary school was the educational practice of ability-grouping or tracking...it was tracking, along with the support of my family and my own effort and talent, that had ultimately carried me from a small farming town to [Harvard University] ...In essence, my ascension to the heights of academic privilege was orchestrated almost twenty years earlier by the well-intentioned grade school teachers and an assortment of odd geometric shapes...Still, the more I learned about the insidious nature and harmful consequences of tracking, consequences even for its benefactors, the less I felt like thanking anyone. - Ruben Navarette, Jr., describes how he feels about ability-grouping in his school. (Navarette, 1997:275-276) Chapter 14 Problems in Politics and the Economy "I didn't vote in the 1996 election... I've never voted. And, you know what? I was more excited about being old enough to drive or buy beer than I've ever been about being old enough to vote. Especially for some old .... in a fancy suit who rides in a limousine and is on the dole in Washington. You think those guys care about me? Hell, no! Well, I don't care about them either-as long as they don't do away with student loans until I get out of this place." - 21 year old man in author's Intro Soc class, Spring 1997. Chapter 15 Problems in the Workplace "I was seven years old the first time I ever set foot inside an automobile factory. The occasion was Family Night at the old Fisher Body plant in Flint where my father worked the second shift. General Motors provided this yearly intrusion as an opportunity for the kin of the work force to funnel in and view their fathers, husbands, and granddads as they toiled away on the assembly line...we found my old man down on the trim line. His job was to install windshields using this goofy apparatus with large suction cups that resembles an octopus being crucified...Car, windshield. Car, windshield. No wonder my father preferred playin' hopscotch with barmaids. This kind of repetition didn't look like any fun at all...Thank God that, even at age seven, I knew what I was going to be when I grew up. There wouldn't be any car windshield cha-cha awaiting me. I was going to be an ambulance driver, the most glamorous calling in the world. Ben Hamper, a former assembly line riveter at GM's truck and bus division, tells why, as a child, he believed that he would never work on an assembly line as his father did. Chapter 16 Population and the Environmental Crisis "You see, there are only nine cabins in the steamer launch which comes in from Dhaka to Patuakhali. In the nine cabins, only 18 people can travel. The ticket is expensive, so only the rich people can travel in the cabins. The rest of the common passengers travel in the deck. The latrine facility [restroom] is provided only for the cabin passengers. But sometimes the passengers from the deck want to use the latrines. The cabin passengers allow them to use the latrine because they are afraid that if the poor deck passengers get angry than they might go down and make a hole in the launch. Then the launch will sink; They will die no doubt but the rich cabin passengers will not survive either. So, my dear sisters, do not give birth to more children as they cause a problem for the cabin passengers." -Writer Farida Ahkter recalls the story she heard one family planning officer tell a group of poor and illiterate women in a remote village in Bangladesh. (The Ecologist, 1993:143) Chapter 17 Urban Problems "The Number 6 [subway] train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops in the 18-minute ride between East 59th Street [the Upper East Side] and Brook Avenue. When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest...In 1991, the median household income of the [Brook Avenue] area... was $7,600...The houses in which these children live, two-thirds of which are owned by the City of New York, are often as squalid as the houses of the poorest children I have visited in rural Mississippi, but there is none of the greenness and the healing sweetness of the Mississippi countryside outside their windows. , which are often barred and bolted as protection against thieves. Some of these houses are freezing in the winter. In dangerously cold weather, the city sometimes distributes electric blankets and space heaters to its tenants...In humid summer weather, roaches crawl on virtually every surface of the houses in which many of the children live. Rates emerge from holes in bedroom walls, terrorizing the infants in their cribs. In the streets outside, the restlessness and anger that are present in all seasons frequently intensify under the stress of heat...If there is a deadlier place in the United States, I don't know where it is." - Social analyst Jonathan Kozol describes life in one part of New York City (Kozol, 1995:3-5). Chapter 18 Global Social Problems It's hard to judge a generation by its statistics. Five years ago, my generation was a group of overstuffed slackers; today we're the Gordon Gekkos [the greedy, corporate-raider of the 1987 movie Wall Street]. An unlikely transformation. But there's at least one statistic that resonates: more of us are taking a full five years to get through college. Most of the country's parents look at this as sort of a slacker ritual...But there's another way to regard that extra year: as a peace dividend. A generation ago, in the midst of the Vietnam War, the idea of a year off from college was dangerously ridiculous. Leaving school meant a one-way ticket to Saigon. Two generations ago it was Korea. Three generations ago, war-torn Europe or the inferno of the Pacific. My generation has had the blessing of growing up in peaceful times, and it has made all the difference...It is premature(also probably unlucky) to call Generation X the peace generation, but the evidence is mounting. No generation in American history has had less traffic with war or its brutally congruent demands for sacrifice and faith. And because we haven't had to fight, we've been free from the conformist pressures of a nation at war. We've found our own unique identity as a generation that thinks and does as it pleases...But this peaceful outlook has brought with it a mouthful of unanswerably hard questions. Is an innocence of war a blessing or a curse? Will out naiveté make us dangerously curious about the tools of violent power? Or is this the start of a thousand years of peace, secured by a certainty that what we have now is forever worth having?" - Author Joshua Cooper Ramo describes life in the absence of war for "Generation X'ers." (Ramo. 1997:69)