Final Reflection, Are We Hopeless?

   During my time observing the culture of Fairfield county, I observed many interesting, humorous, and oftentimes aggravating things. While many of the observations I recorded were related in someway to a negative aspect of our culture, it is important to not that I saw (and continue to see) beautiful things in our society. Especially in our liberal corner of the world, I find that Fairfield county in particular is much more accepting (on a whole) of the LGBT community, although there is still much progress to be made. Compared to many other places I visited and stayed, I feel very lucky to live in such a place.  However, I must point out the imperfections, and not allow my appreciation of my area to cloud my observations about its setbacks. I focused initially on racial and “ethnic” culture issues, and I found that the citizens of Fairfield county are mostly blissfully unaware of many cultures and lifestyles. However, instead of viewing this as a reflection on the quality of the people themselves, I realized that this continued ignorance was not embraced consciously but slowly trained into them through the mass media and advertising culture. 

       Seeing my friends spout stereotypes at a new years party was certainly not comforting, but I understood that the movies and television roles for minorities that they had grown up with were breeding their ignorance. My father too, proved to me that even someone who makes an effort to be culturally aware can be brainwashed by our culture to believe in lies. If hummus is included on every Greek restaurant’s menu, and yogurt is advertised as “Greek” even though it’s made in upstate New York, how can we trust anything our society tells us about foreign cultures? And what made society this way? It looks to me like a circular system of ignorance, taken from the people and put into the media and then regurgitated back to the people again. We feel pressures from everywhere to think a certain way and value certain things. The worst part is that these pressures are conflicting and often leave people in distress, unable to fit all the molds that are pushed upon them. For example the girl in the bookstore who felt pressure to be “ashamed” of her taste in reading material was being told to act less “silly and girly” while the little girls watching cartoons as harmless as Phineas and Ferb and the Avengers are being told that “silly and girly” are their jobs and their way through which to approach life. 

        As far as gender culture goes, I noticed that people often make the mistake of thinking that our issue today is still people thinking “women can’t be successful or powerful” but this isn’t the case. Now, it’s “women must be women, and that is success.” It implies that a woman can and should be successful, but that her ultimate goal is still fulfilling her gender role and achieving love and beauty. While this is definitely a valid goal and a somewhat universal one, it is not a rule, and it creates a very negative pressure on women- to be successful AND beautiful AND loved AND to give all of this to a man and for the “man’s sake”. There is so much pressure, and our culture reflects this. Especially in Fairfield county, where beauty and affluence is everywhere.  Initially I felt hopeless- I worried that our society would never be able to escape the whirlwind of media culture brainwash- but then I remembered I was writing this. We can’t change the past and we will never be able to “forget” the traditional separations forced upon genders and races, be we can personally overcome them. Observing society and culture around you, constantly questioning things and exploring your own values is the best hope for awareness.  Awareness is key- you may not be able to change the society around you on a drastic scale, but you can control the way you interpret your cultural space.  There is hope for us, Fairfield county! (*Rings the bells of feminism and racial equality and skips through the streets*)