Facebook Campaign

I will hopefully be getting permission to administer a Facebook page titled NCHC: Partners in the Park.

The acronym NCHC sounds for the National Collegiate Honors Council and their mission is to "support and enhance the community of educational institutions, professionals, and students who participate in collegiate honors education around the world."

One way they are doing that is through the program Partners in the Park. The program originated out of South Utah University by a man named Matthew Nickerson, who has the honors director for sometime. He partnered up with Paul Roelandt, a ranger from Cedar Breaks and they did the first snowshoeing "project" as they call them. The program is designed to educate honors students who they believe the majority of them will become leaders and teach them about the outdoors. Different ways you can experience, educate them on the history of the parks and the land, how to take care of them so generations to come can have the same experience. They hope to create advocates to not only care and respect for the parks, but to show support for the parks so the government one day doesn't decided to shut them down. They hope students will take these experiences you will continue to share them with her family and friends and then share that experience with the people they love, so on and so forth.

I think it is a great program and I had the opportunity, thanks to the funding provided from the reestablishing Honors program here at Dixie, to go on that same snowshoeing at SUU that started the whole think and meet both Nickerson and Ranger Roelandt. I never experienced snowshoeing, snow that deep, or winter camping and I loved it. I thought it was a great experience and I definitely will be passing it along to my friends and family.

But..... they could use some help promoting themselves.
This is their Facebook page: NCHC: Partners in the Park

Tactics:

• Most projects are during the breaks, great timing for students.
• Post about past projects, contact people who have experienced those past trips.
• Post about future projects, contact people who plan on attending those projects. 
• Get in touch with people who put together and host the projects. 
• Post news and information on national and state parks and monuments. 
• Encourage students, advisers, honors programs to share, tweet and insta their experiences. 

Communication Objectives: 

1. To promote an opportunity of outdoor experiential learning for driven students in honors programs across the country by gaining outdoor skills and knowledge.

2. To show how to love the national and state parks and monuments, but not love them to death.

3. To teach and build a partnership with the students and the parks so that future partnerships will be taught, shared and flourish and the parks and monuments will have advocates to support and care for them for generations to come.

Target Audience:

Jade Poulmen, 20, Gainsville, FL

Alice is a sophomore at the University of Florida. She has never traveled any farther west than the Mississippi. She has also never seen snow or camping, but she loves to travel, meet new people, and learn from new experiences. She has googled beautiful pictures of the red rock out in southern Utah and thinks snowshoeing in the winter sounds like a great first visit.

Caroline Peebles, 22, St. George, UT

Tanya is a senior,originally from St. George, and attends Dixie State University because out-of-state is out of the question. Tanya loves the outdoors and jumps in her car every weekend she can to experience the wonders southern Utah has to offer. She is an experienced hiker, rock climber, canyoneerer, kayaker, swimmer and mountain biker. She loves to travel when she can afford it and would love to experience something outside of the desert. She wonders if Olympic National Park is as green as she has seen on Pinterest.

Derek Waters, 18, Crow Agency, MT

Derek is a freshman who choose to start college at a Little Big Horn College, because it was cheap, close to home and he figured a community college was a good starting point.  Derek is young and inexperienced in may things and like most freshmen still undecided in his major, but he is a hard worker, bright and very intelligent. Montana is all he has ever known and wonders what the warm ocean feels like washing off the sand in between his toes. He can't wait to hear back to about the scholarship he will win to venture to the US Virgin Islands where he will find his inspiration to become an environmental scientist.

Rascism 2.0

It is a bit of a funny question to look at the rubric and ask what my position on racism is. When I was younger I use to think racism was a thing of the past but as I've gotten older I have realized just how short a hundred to fifty years really is.

I think of my earliest realizations that racism still existed was actually a conversation I had with my mom. I can't remember exactly how the conversation went, but it was basically me telling her how I had more of an attraction to darker men and then her making the comment that "I tried telling your Dad to be prepared that you might bring one home." To that I asked why she would say a thing like that and she said your dad is a bit racist, which was a complete surprise to me. I had a cousin (whom I consider an Uncle due to age) that made it quite clear he was racist, but not my dad. I can't quite remember my age, but I believe I was a senior in high school or the end of my freshman year of college. Up to that point I had never even dated anybody white. I had dated Mexican (because the was the majority of the community population in high school) , my high school sweetheart was half indie, half white (but he didn't look white), and I hadn't ever been in a relationship with someone black, but I had hung around with a few different black guys.

I was so surprised by that conversation with my mom because my dad is one of the most caring people I know. He is the guy who has swallowed thousands and thousands of dollars helping out his other six siblings and his parents, the man who was the first one to come upon a car accident and immediately start pulling people out of the wreck,  the man who wanted me to take a sip of his drink as a kid just so he could laugh at the face he knew I would make, the man who jokes around with my first dates, and the man who would do and has done absolutely everything to give his wife and girls a good life. Him racist? Was news to me.

Then my mom had made the comment of "think about your kids." I laughed at this," Think of my kids? Mom we are living in the 21st century." I think that was the moment I realized how short a century is, that was when I became skeptical to think how many white people who still are.

I am not racist, but I am still fearful. Is it from the stereotypes made? Not the ones we all joke about like all black people like fried chicken or all white girls crave Starbucks. But the ones like all black people steal or all Muslims believe in the resolution of violence.

So is stereotyping racist? I don't think I am superior because I am white, or personally attack anyone with racial slurs under my breathe while passed by someone of a different race. I don't think 'damn those niggers and those self-exploding bastards,' but I am skeptical when I sit in a room with a Muslim in traditional dress or pass a black citizen in the street alone in the evening.  Does my skepticism make me racist? Has stereotyping lead me unconsciously through antipathy to being racist?

And actually these thoughts of skepticism don't cross my mind if I see a female Muslim in a head dress or pass a black woman late at night, it is only with men. So then am I sexist?

Stereotyping is defined as a generalization, where as racism is defined as a general belief of superiority due to race. Positive stereotypes I think can be humorous, a way to laugh at ourselves and even a starting point. I saw this humor when I searched the hashtag I'm racist.

Sometimes we expect ourselves and others to live up to our stereotypes (below).




And others admit their biases.

Negatives stereos types is what is dangerous. I think they imply superiority and can lead to aversion and antipathy which is racism.

I think we can live with stereotypes, we just need to remember the negatives come from a marginalized percentage.

On the Media: The Language of Terror

I am afraid of Muslims. I won't deny that when I am in the same room as a Muslim that I am skeptical, but I hate that I am. Maybe they are just as skeptical of me that I will do something out of fear to them because I am white, just as much as I am skeptical of them that they will do something out of hate because they are Muslim.

I find my skepticism ignorant of fear and I hate that is probably due to the lack of my uneducated perspective. That us why I chose this On The Media "The Language of Terror" on a whim it would help me bring my trivial closer to full circle. It did a bit, at least a starting point.

During this episode on On the Media Jack Shafer said the media likes to dramatize while Habib Battah said the media only confuses on the drama.

Shafer said in our culture we portray villains always as diabolical and the media plays on this using words like "mastermind" and "unprecedented" but Shafter said says aren't geniuses but what they are doing is "about as sophisticated as ordering a pizza."

J.M. Berger, who wrote a book titled "ISIS State of Terror", said that we either over estimate terrorists or underestimate and both our to the terrorists advantage. If we over estimate them then we make ISIS bigger than they are and we underestimate them and they execute a plan then everybody freaks out.

I think they are simply trying to say that we overthink things. Have we done this to ourselves through our pop culture and media? I think it is a bit humorous that we always preach to stay calm in serious and dangerous situations like fires, earthquake, etc. because when we panic we don't think straight or logically. Then why should we act any different when faced with the serious situation of terrorism?

Habib Battah at the end of his interview criticized the media for not focusing on more stories about people like Adel Termos, but instead they continue to focus on the drama of the Islamic actions. I thought the media was suppose to present both sides, all sides to a story? We don't get context from the media on how marginalized ISIS is to the number of Muslims.

But are we the public any better? Joanne Stocker is a managing editor of Grasswire, a website that uses crowd sourcing, which I am assuming is social media, to fact check breaking news. Stocker said that "we have a human need for answer" which is why we are scapegoating to refugees. I thought it was crazy to hear of the picture she has come across where a selfie was photo-shopped to make the person appear as a terrorist and deemed him to be one of the attackers of Paris. Like it was probably just an average day person ruining another average day person's life for the sake of a social media hit. How could you ruin someone life like that? How many heroes like Adel Termos are you willing to Photoshop for the sake of your fear?

A couple more points. One is that J.M. Berger had hit on the point of name-calling and we call them ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh because they are suppose to have a negative connotation like name-calling. Berger points out though that we still include in the acronym Islamic State and this doesn't de-legitimatize them. So why go with Bergers idea separate the terrorists from Islam and give them another name, one that doesn't legitimize them? Then maybe we will stop stereotyping the rest of the ordinary Muslim citizens as terrorists.  

Point two, Mark Lynch, a political science and international affairs professor at George Washington University, had said that ISIS believes that is wrong to have coexistence with Islam and non-Islam, but the majority of Islam, those everyday citizens don't agree with this radical idea. So one of the goal of ISIS is to make it impossible for Islam to live in peace in the west and so we literally are playing into the hand of terrorists by dramatizing the marginal actions we have seen from ISIS and further stereotyping that extremism to all Muslims.


We are not at war with Islam we are at war with terrorists.


The podcast definitely help me a little less fearful and a little more skeptical of the bad and more vigilante for the good. I am tried of being fearful for the lack of my understanding. I'm tried of us all being fearful for the lack for all our willingness to not understand.

I think this podcast and handbook can put a little more context to our fear of terrorism.

#SOTU

Before I watched the State of the Union Address I decided to jot down a few thoughts I had about Obama to see if my thoughts have changed.

I honestly don't know if Obama is a good President or not. I haven't followed the government too much and I am ashamed to say, like much of my generation I am an uneducated in this area. Which is the reasoning why I don't have a very strong opinion, I like to listen a lot before I make one, but even then I also myself vulnerable to change.

I was registered to vote and am ashamed again to say I was an educated voter that canceled out an educated vote, which Professor Green here at DSU argues why it is pointless for people to vote. I didn't vote for Obama, I felt like the country was voting for him because he was black and that is my honest opinion. I voted for Mitt Romney, because I had learned he helped Utah come out of debt utilizing the Olympics when it was hosted in Salt Lake City. Again, I am ashamed to say I never checked these facts and simply voted off of a gut feeling.

Now I am not racist. In fact, St. George is the whitest community I have ever lived in and is, for another fun fact, actually dubbed whitetopia according to Rich Benjamin, who traveled the US and studied whitetopias and whom I listened to in the Ted Radio Hour podcast titled Adaptation.

I think Obama is a good man and means well, but I don't know how well of a job he actually did.

#SOTU

I missed the beginning of it SOTU, but I don't think I missed much when I finally found it on the forbidden channel of Fox and didn't want to waste time finding where CNN is on the unlabeled sea of channels of cheap cable.

"The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period," Obama had stated. First of I was a little spectacle of this especially after the frame cut to a group of military personnel, who didn't smile, clap, or stand.

Now they could just be a group of angry old white conservative men, but I don't know. At the very least I don't think it is shameful to be skeptical. Second, I feel statements like these more or less puts a target on our back. We are not in a giant international sports league with other countries, these people will kill us.


Obama did say right after we don't make good decisions, but why do we say these things in the first place?

So I am not the most tech savvy or the most social media savvy, aka why I am taking this class. So, because of that I was confused at first when I first was following the twitter feed and watching SOTU and not seeing any radical comments. Then the light bulb went off and I realized there was a top tweet feed and all tweet feed.

You could find some tweet criticism in the top feed, but I felt like I was scrolling through advertisement. Click this, get involved here, etc. I also found it humorous that "Obama" was tweeting as he was speaking.


I appreciate the humor for keeping things light and the skepticism because I like being exposed to opposing views for the sake of keeping us on our toes, but it made me wonder how top tweets were choose and interesting to see some of the irrelevant things people paid attention to.

Then when I switch to the all tweets the feed was more balanced of negative and positive, and the radicals popped up that I was looking for.

I spent some time trying to find my own chirp in the vociferous amount of tweeting going on in the all tweets feed, but was unsuccessful. I also tried looking through my feed to see what my friends were saying, but like the rest of our generation they are as guilty as I had previously openly admitted to falling in the stereotype of not being involved.

One of my favorite parts of the speech was when Obama said we needed to be better citizens.

" It's a lot easier to be cynical; to accept that change is not possible, and the politics is hopeless, and the problem is all the folks who are elected don't car, and to believe that our voices and actions don't matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future."

"... our collective futures depends on your willingness to uphold your duties as a citizen. To vote. To speak out. To stand up for others, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable, knowing that each of us is only here because somebody, somewhere, stood up for us. We need every American to stay active in our public life and not just during election time so that our public life reflects the goodness and decency that I see in the American people every single day."

This to me is one of the biggest problems in American, we are inactive and therefore uneducated and I hate that. I hate that about myself, about my generation, but we are not the only ones guilty of this. It is time for us to start getting involved, to become educated, learn to care again and to reestablish civility as a value quality in our culture. I want to be educated so I can be a good citizen.