The "Glorious" White City

An issue topic that is discussed by Lesko in Act Your Age is the ego of the White American Male.  This is clearly illustrated early on when Lesko gives a portrayal of the 1893 opening of the World's Colombian Exchange in Chicago, and its subsequent "White City".  While I was born in a moderately diverse town in Texas and later lived in Omaha, Nebraska for a time before I started Kindergarten, after that time I was living in relative cultural isolation.  After living in Omaha, and until I moved to Columbia to begin my College career, I lived in a myriad of small towns, the largest being around 1,200 residents.  I did have a few African American friends in Omaha and worked for an Indian family in High School, however, these were essentially the only two instances of my experience with those outside WASP culture.  This, to a moderate degree, effected my relationship with people of color, or perhaps more of just a lack of cultural understanding.  I was used to being around people more or less the same as me, when coming to college I met many new people with vastly differing heritage and cultre.  After some time at college I have come to relish this situation and long for more instances to learn about others ideas and ways of life.

Stage Presence of a Skater

When discussing identity in children it is important to think of how individuals present their identity.  Until discussing this in recent classes I had not thought much about my own "presentation of self", especially in my youth.  Goffman discusses the importance of shared symbols.  Examples I can remember from my childhood the relate to the use of symbols are many.  One such example was was both my friends and my essential obsession regarding skateboarding, and "action sports" more generally.  During most of elementary school my friends and I would skateboard or ride our bikes outside, inside we would watch the X Games or play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.  We would build our own ramps and design unique games to play with various tools of the trade: wood planks, rails, skateboards, bikes, roller skates, and the like.  Not only did our play revolve around these things, our dialogue reflected it.  Aside from the common "dude" and "rad", we delved deep into "Action Sports" culture and jargon discussing such intricacies as lazer flips and the superfluousness of risers.  This knowledge allowed us, in some cases, to verbalize our thoughts with more ease by using the aforementioned genre as a may hodgepodge of metaphors and comparisons to the world we were discovering.  Along with that I had to assume some personas, similar to Goffman's idea of performers on a stage.  

Prepubescent Politics

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/five-offenses-that-can-land-kids-but-not-adults-in-jail-20140324
People often refuse to associate their fluffy version of children with the cold, and many times brutal, world of politics.  However, children do tend to have a generous pull within the sphere of politics.  From prompting their parents to move into a neighboring school district to influencing policy maneuvers, it "all for the children".  I think it slightly unfortunate then that children have little to no influence over the political landscape.  I believe it even more disheartening that children are generally denied information in regards to politics, even though they might show great interest.  Politics is often seen as too complicated or too mature for young individuals.  As the attached article shows this is highly unfair because children are often far more restricted than adults.  While I do not think that kids should share all rights with adults, I do think that they should at least be informed on why the system is and must be set up this way.  Perhaps even let kids review and lobby against it if they feel it unjust enough a cause.  Regardless of the actual implementation of children into the political system, I certainly feel that they should be thoroughly educated on how it works and why it is constructed they way it is.  This would hopefully give kids a head start for when they are old enough to vote, and may even allow them to change things they see as unjust.

Boredom a Newly Evolving Problem

In Chapter 6 of Coining For Capital Kapur discusses how being "bored" is a relatively new issue.  Before the spread of wealth and general prosperity in the U.S., children were often destined to work from a young age.  This lack of free time and long list of tasks prevented a absence of tasks to conquer.  With new found wealth, and a fresh market for children, Americans began consuming at high rates.  More recently, as Kapur discusses, parents now feel as though they must outright combat boredom in their children (p. 129).  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/nyregion/teenager-tells-police-boredom-led-him-to-start-fire-that-injured-2-officers.html?_r=0.  As this article makes clear, bored children can be very dangerous.  Not only may they fall in with the wrong crowd, they might just set a mattress on fire.  Just as Kapur relates with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, children's minds are dangerous when left to their own devices, unstimulated by consumer goods.  This seems to hold true even for young children.  Recently there have been many reincarnations of videos alleging to make babies more intelligent.  Thus, to keep our children intelligent and at the forefront of their age group, not to mentions out of gangs, we must buy goods and force our infants to lay motionless in front of a television screen.  Perhaps if we can manage to keep kids busy enough they won't get into any trouble.

Nailing Down the Niche

When beginning to think about Coining For Capital, as a History major, I often think to the milieu of the point in time which is being discussed.  The early works discussed by Kapur, such as the original version of The Little Princess, were first distributed around the time of the second World War.  This was a time, especially after the war, when Americans, and America itself, found their lot for the most part improved.  With this came not only faith in they system of capitalism, but also, due to the general increase in money, children could attend more school.  Also individuals, perhaps more significantly children, wielded much larger purchasing power.  As companies began to notice this they often began to specifically target children, attempting to shape individuals from childhood into rabid consumers, this would only be exacerbated by subsequent improvements in advertising.  Ideas about what children should be and act like grew more and and more concise.  Similarly, it seems companies would stretch further and further to sell their version of reality to kids and adults alike.  An example of this is the complete lack of historical accuracy in Pocahontas.  As Kapur points out, their was no love interest between John Smith and Pocahontas in real life, they were many years apart in age.  This among things like the seeming agreement of Native Americans and English Colonizers to live in peace and harmony.  While I understand that everyone is entitled to poetic licensing, I feel that we must not allow History to be whitewashed by sweet sounding falsehoods.  

Comic Books... A Great Threat To Us All.

We can often get so caught up in current media storms as to forget that this is not a recent phenomenon.  Though crime is a common culprit many others have arisen.  One that first came to my mind was Comic Books.  In the 1930s and 40s amid a rise in the so-called "Crime" comic books, along with a erroneous suspicion that crime was on the rise, all comic books came under scrutiny.  At the time comic books were a unregulated market, due to the fact that it was in its infancy.  Soon parent groups and politicians, hungry for votes and issues not revolving around the war, began attacking the comic book industry.  While press coverage may not have been as vast as today, the media of the time certainly kept the public up to date on the horrors of these little books.  This scenario was similar to what Sternhiemer discusses in regard to child abductions.  As with the abductions the number of truly obscene comics was far inferior to the average comics that were just attempting to tell an interesting story to youngsters.  Soon the industry would become regulated with the birthing of the Comics Code Authority in 1954.  After this time almost all comic books began to adhere to the code which hurt the sales for many distributors.  Comic Books are simply another example of how those "in charge of children" often attempt to shape them by prohibiting certain activities perceived to undermine society.