This is America(blog 2)
Some of us in minority communities in the United States were very familiar with this song when in came out in 2018. The song started out with a beautiful melody, that was so catchy when it first started, and its still catchy to this day. The song started with “we just want party, party just for you”, and when you heard that i swear you just wanted to keep singing those same lyrics, and you would just start moving your shoulders and start dancing. After those few verses of Childish Gambino singing that, the beat quickly switched up on us listeners and he said “this is America…don’t catch you slippin’ up”. This song is basically about what it means to be black in America. How it is still hard being a minority in today’s society. The verse “police be trippin’ now, yeah this is America, guns in my area, I got the strap, I gotta carry em”. Now police brutality towards minorities, has been around forever, it’s been around since minorities have been here in this country. It’s only now is that social media plays a big factor, and everyone has a phone on their cameras. There have been so many cases about unarmed black men America being shot for no reason by these policemen, because they feel “threatened”. I’m pro black, and pro minority. Minorities here in America, get killed unarmed, not having done anything, such as, Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Oscar Grant, but Dylann Roof, a white guy who killed 9 African Americans in a church, gets in police chase, and was found in Shelby NC, and they take him alive, and EVEN stopped to let him get some food. That’s the issue most minorities have, because we as minorities do not have those same equal rights. This song is for being black in America, and the struggles.
Photography of North America(Deserts)
Our Deserts here in america, reflect the differences in regions as far as elevation, temperature, an rainfall, long with the various types of animals and plants we have those states. As you can see from the first picture we have, those are the four major deserts we have in the states . They are all on the Northwest to the south east. The city of Las Vegas, is located on the North Portion of the Mojave desert, and bases such as Fort Irwin and Twenty Nine Palms are located in such areas as well. The Mojave Desert sits in southern California, southern Nevada, and eastern Arizona. This desert has long dry summers, and short freezing winters. Cactus are the main plants around these areas. The Great Basin desert is very cold and dry, its in the northern part of Nevada. This area does get snow in a predicable order in the long winters. The Sonoran Desert is warm, the elevation is low, its subtropical which is different from most. This desert does get monsoon seasons in the summer and winter. Its vegetation is very diverse. It has cactus and thorny brushes. The last desert desert is the Chihuahuan. This desert s similar to the Mojave desert because it’s very hot, high elevation. This area does get a good amount of predicable rain fall every year. It’s mostly in Mexico, but it does reach to southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico. It has a lot of grasses and small cacti.
Photography of North America (water falls)
These two pictures are pictures of some waterfalls we have here in this continent of North America. A waterfall is an area where water flows over a series of steep drops in the course of stream/river off the edge or cliff of a mountain. Yosemite natural park has an abundance of waterfalls and the best time to see them is during the beginning of the spring when the snow is melting so the runoff will be so much more flourishing to watch. Yosemite falls is the steepest waterfall we have here in North America. 2,425 ft steep. Its made up of three separate; Upper, middle cascades, and lower Yosemite falls. Niagara is the most famous of all falls we have heard here in America. There are some people who don’t know that Niagara falls is an actual city in upstate New York and that it runs along side the Niagara river. Its a 365-year round state park. Its 167 feet steep. There’s an observation tower that looks over all three of the of the waterfalls. The area all together is almost 17 miles long, and the elevation is 614 ft.
Cajun? the seasoning or the people? Or do you mean Creole?
We all know or most of us know about Cajun seasoning but this isn’t the cajun I’m referring to, the Cajuns I’m referring to are the people, the Cajun people. Cajun people are french colonist who settled in what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They named their region Arcadia, and were known as Arcadians. The British came and took over Canada in 1713 and ordered the Arcadians to defend Britain, and were ordered to adopt the religion of the kingdom which was to be protestant. Over the next 4 decades, the Arcadians would keep refusing the proposal, so England ordered the English colonizers to patronize, and terrorize the people and take over there crops. The English colonizers rounded up all of the Arcadians and put them on ships to send them off the Louisiana, New York, and the west indies. Many of them were accepted into the French speaking colony and they adopted the name Cajuns, and they had their own distinct lifestyles.
Suburbs or Slums? Which do you live in and do you want to get out?
Do you live in place of poverty? Do you live in a nice middle class to high class neighborhood? Are you and your family well off or are you all struggling to make ends meet and live check to check? In my posts, I don’t really like to add my own personal experiences into to the fact, but I grew up in both, so I was born in California, I was sent overseas to my Grandparents and uncles in Morocco and Guinea Bissau because both of my parents were in the military. Now the houses I stayed in were Rubane and Fes weren’t the best houses. The house in Fes was in the Slums, and the shore house we stayed in Rubane was basically a hut. My twin brother and I already knew we weren’t in the best places to live. When we came back to the states, we came back to a nice military neighborhood and once my parents retired, we moved to a real nice neighborhood near the beaches. My parents wanted us to experience the way they had lived and grown up when they were kids, so that we could experience life as they did and it taught us to be more appreciative in what we have and to be thankful that we actually live under a roof. At a young age, I knew what the slums/ghettos were and how they were different from areas like the suburbs. GDP stands fro Gross Domestic Product, is a measurement of a country’s economic output that accounts for a number of people across. The country’s/town/cities GDP is divided by the population. It tells you the prosperity rate or percentage of how the area feels to each citizens. If you ask the everyday person to define wealth and poverty, the person would say; nice car, nice house, or broken down car, run down house, clothes look bad. Now you do have other sects of GDP, you have real GDP which is the inflation or adjusted value increased in prices and the fall in the purchasing value of the money. The other sect is average GDP tells us how big a person’s share of GDP would be if it were divided into the total into the equal portions. Ways we could help our wealth, is to distribute one’s wealth correctly, as in buying what you need not what you want all of the time. Invest and save will also help yourself. Quality of Life is dependent on where you live too! People in poverty, have the worst health, they don’t go to the best healthcare, can’t get the medicine’s they need, and with food, fast food is the cheapest, so places inn poverty, you eat what you can eat. Having an education will better your chances at life, there are a few anomalies in which people who don’t have education who have made it big. Usually an education will lead you into having a life where you aren’t in a poverty ridden state.
A trip of NC
North Carolina is beautiful state, and not being from here, I have a different view from some and then the same view from others. to find the meaning of geography, we must first know what geography is, and that is the study of physical features of earth, its atmosphere, and the affects of human activities on this earth. Now North Carolina is a unique state, its one of those states where you can get the best of three worlds geographically,meaning that we have the coastal plains(flat areas, beaches), Piedmont(hills, the bigger cities of NC) and the Mountain regions which is self explanatory . Now me, I would start at the beach since that’s where I live. I would go along the coast, from all the beaches near Wilmington and Shallote, to Morehead City, Emerald Isle, Ocracoke, Cape hatteras. I would find someone who works along the coast who historically could tell me more about the coast. I would go to the Coast Guard base in Atlantic Beach, and ask for info, showing me the sand dunes and marshes etc. I would then travel to the Piedmont region and look at the hills, and you can really see them in the Greensboro/Burlington/Winston-Salem area. You can also see them in High School football stadiums, around especially in Garner high school because the high school looks like it sits in a basin. I would travel south piedmont and look at the areas around Charlotte and look at the landscapes around there. The Mountains i have explored at the first university I attended, and there are plenty of mountains to hike, such as kings mountain, Mt. Mitchell, and others, you can look at the mines they may have near the mountains. I would go to someone who’s lived there for years to show me the areas, like Lake James, Lake Norman(give or take with it being in the Piedmont and mountain regions).
Purc Reflection? how was it? What did I Learn?
PURC was a great experience for me to be honest. When I first heard about PURC in the beginning of the year, I wasn’t sure about it at first. I was somewhat nervous about presenting at first. I really though I was going to be on stage presenting in front of everyone presenting my poster with the powerpoint on the screen. As it started to get closer to PURC, I finally realized how it was going to play out. I didn’t realize that I always would attend the presentations because I would always get invited to go to them. The day of PURC I had memorized all of the answers to every question. When walked into the UC Annex, I was surprised by the number of people who had posters to present, and I was shocked by the number of groups that were presenting. I had forgotten that we could have worked together on the project. I didn’t have the number of visitors that I thought I would, I mainly had the Judges and the guest speaker come up to me and ask about my poster. The guest Speaker was the one who grilled me on every question, and asked me about why I chose the topic of baseball. I had a lot of people who came by and read my poster but everyone was really intrigued. I feel as if that more people who understood baseball at the school, and the all around physics that go into the game, and how the playing field caters or how it wouldn’t cater to the players, they would have understood the concept a little better.
Photography of North America(longest rivers)
Now we all know or have known that the Mississippi River is the longest river here in North America. We’ve been learning this ever since we’ve been learning this ever since we all have been in grade school. This river stretches across 9 different states and stretches over 2348 miles(some sources differ). Now i was told that is the second longest River behind the next river i was going to talk introduce which is the Missouri River, but i’m not so sure which sources to believe because some say its the longest river, and some other sources say that its the second longest river.
Now this Missouri River, in which I had never heard of until a few years ago, is 2341 miles long across the mid west region of the U.S. This river is the longest some sources say. This river along with the Mississippi river, was watershed for Native American tribes. Since its a watershed, and natives lived nomadic lifestyles, so they were dependent on bison and other animals to be there to drink, so it was also a place to find a meal. These two rivers are some of the reasons why there were wars against the settlers who stole the land from the Indians.
Photography of North America(Biggest Cities in North America)
This weeks photography of North America, is of one showing the top five biggest cities by population in North America. The biggest cities by population in order are; Mexico City with 20,892.724 people, New York City with 20,182,305 people, Los Angeles with 13,340,068 people, Chicago with 9,551,031 people, and Dallas-Fort Worth with 7,102,796 people. First looking at this list, the last city surprised me, I didn’t think Dallas had more people then Houston(even though Houston is #6), Miami or Boston! But I didn’t know Mexico was that heavily populated. I would love to go to Mexico and New York City just to see how congested the city is. I also would love to know what cool areas Mexico City has, and how well it is as a city for a family to raised in.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-cities-in-north-america.html
A Sifaka's thought 