Is This Really in the Christmas Spirit?

This is a recent Best Buy commercial that completely goes against the spirit of Christmas. In the video the women beats Santa at present buying and hasn't left any room for Santa to leave his presents. In a way this goes represent the American value of competitiveness. Santa was too slow so a faster better gifted person took up his spot. The Christmas industry had evolved and Santa couldn't keep up, what a shame. We are surrounded by so many advertisements for all of the latest electronics that represent a fast paced world where things are only new for a few days because there is always something better. It's sad that the spirit of Christmas seems to be fading away as the magic of Santa is being bested by low-price electronics. Unfortunately, the Christmas magic has been fading for some time. It is now thought that children aren't learning the Christmas music that used to a staple of the holidays. This has got me thinking, why have larger corporations been able to commercialize cornerstones of society like Christmas? Is this commercialization unavoidable? Also are there other traditions that have started to lose their true meaning as corporations look for new ways to expand their business?

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Modern Civil Liberties Violations

We have been talking a lot in class about civil liberties that have been violated in the past. How do those civil liberties violations from the past compare to civil liberties violations from the 21st century?

In the past we have seen many civil liberties violationed. This includes the Sedition Act, which stopped anybody from writing anything that opposed the government, and the Japanese Internment during World War II.

Today we are still experiencing civil liberties violations. Guantanamo Bay is an ever-present example of civil liberties being violated. The Justice Department decided that the camp was outside of U.S. legal jurisdiction. Then the Bush administration said that the detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Any prisoner that is held in Guantanamo Bay is denied the right of habeas corpus as it states in this article. The Geneva Convention also protects the detainees from torture which has occurred in Guantanamo Bay. Finally people have been held in Guantanamo Bay for over two years without trial.

This leads to the questions, why are civil liberties constantly violated during wartime?  Are the civil liberties that are being violated today more or less justified than the civil liberties that were violated in the past?

Connections to the Past

I recently traveled with my american studies class to Lincoln Park to see the play "Clybourne Park." Walking around Lincoln Park I was struck by the apartments that seemed to have their front doors below street level. It appeared that the new Lincoln Park had covered up the Lincoln Park of the past.

After doing some research on the Lincoln Park neighborhood, I came across this article. It seems that residents of the area originally ranged from very affluent people focused on the park and the loop, to German farmers and shopkeepers in the North, and to industrial workers living close to the factories along the North section of the Chicago River.

The area ran into hard times during the Great Depression. Owners who had fallen on hard times neglected their properties. After World War II, residents of the southeastern section of Lincoln Park worried that their neighborhood would soon become a slum. This led to the Lincoln Park Conservation Association being created in 1954. This led to an urban-renewal program that encouraged private restoration of properties.

This led to a stark resistance from the poorer residents of Lincoln Park who resided in the southwestern area   of Lincoln Park. They complained that they were being priced out of their homes. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the land values have increased dramatically and pretty much all of the poor have left. Lincoln Park is now one of the highest-status neighborhoods in the city.

Taking all of this into account, I still wonder about the raised street. The reason for not completely filling in everything could be completely monetary. By not filling in an apartment there is another place for someone to live and pay rent. After considering what I saw in the play "Clybourne Park," I think the reason for not filling in everything goes deeper than that.

In the play "Clybourne Park," the father of a Korean War veteran wants to bury the belongings of his son who committed suicide. The wife of the father however, keeps telling her husband to wait until tomorrow to bury her sons possessions. Why have her husband wait? Why not get those bad memories out of her life?

No one wants to completely erase events in their lives. They like to hold on to memories that remind them of the past. No one ever completely forgets and are always affected by their past. We see this in the second act of "Clybourne Park." The family moving in to the house where the son committed suicide rethinks buying the house as soon as they learn of the suicide. Why should it matter if a person committed suicide in your house 50 years ago? It had no bearing on their life and they weren't connected to the son at all. But the fact that it happened affects their view on the house.

The same ideas expressed in the play show up in the decision to not fill in the entire street. Lincoln Park strives to be a cultural mecca and showing some signs that the past still is present in the community help them achieve that. Successful neighborhoods usually have ties to the past and in turn the residents feel more connected to the community and each other. This want for a connection to the past is why I believe Lincoln Park chose not to fill in the entire street.