Lesbian feminism emerged as a result of exclusion from the women’s liberation movement. Lesbianism was largely ignored because many believed that it would undermine the credibility of the movement by reintroducing sex into the feminist agenda and a lot of women preferred the sexual respite feminism granted and thought including lesbian feminism would eliminate said respite.

Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. She also was a feminist who wasn’t all for the integration of lesbian feminism, though, her exclusion wasn’t entirely unfounded. Her concern, and that of other straight feminists, was that the first thing that would come to the minds of men would be “‘mannish’ or ‘man-hating’ lesbians” and that, consequently would “hinder the cause”. A lesbian agenda would compromise political power and image that feminists worked so hard to gain and create. However, she failed to realize, or perhaps care, that these so called “man-hating” lesbians were women, too, and they wanted and deserved the same things that every woman in the country was fighting for. All they wanted was to aid the cause.  Friedan, eventually, went so far as to refer to lesbian feminism as the “lavender menace”, which further infuriated lesbian feminists and practically lit the fire of persistence in the heart of movement.

In the ten-paragraph manifesto titled The Woman Identified Woman, written The Radicalesbians, a lesbian is defined as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion...She...acts...to be a more complete and free human being than her society-,...cares to allow her...these needs and actions...bring her into painful conflict...until is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually herself.” This quote pretty much sums up the amount of strength that a lesbian has to have to simply be there self-a luxury every heterosexual doesn’t even acknowledge on a day-to-day basis. On top of this she must also battle the challenge of owning up to herself semi-acceptable identity as a woman. Everyday that this woman decides to show herself she shows the political and societal defiance of ten straight feminists. On May 1, 1970, at the “ Second Congress to Unite Women” lesbian activists rushed the stage, conspicuous in there objective to be heard. To their surprise, they were almost immediately joined by members of the audience who wished to aid in their cause.

Initially, the women’s liberation movement wasn’t an all-inclusive cause. The heterosexual feminists that dominated it, succeeded in being seen as the men they fought so hard to be venerated in relation to, in the way that they regarded lesbians as nothing more than a discredibility, because that wrongly placed and forced stigma/stereotype. However, after many protests and the cooperation of open, understanding minds, lesbian rights soon became, and continue to be, recognized as “‘a legitimate concern of feminism.”’

When I was in 5th grade, I got my first C ever in writing, which was a subject I struggled with. I don’t remember how it happened. I don’t count it as a huge thing for me. I don’t know why, but I could never really tie any significance to it. I remember feeling really upset about it. I don’t think I have had a report card without a C since, which I guess never really seemed to bother me. I used to be a star student. It’s not like I lost motivation or stopped caring, things just were never the same. Everything changed for the worse. Every year since then my life has seemed to get progressively worse and worse in every way possible.

That’s the version of the story I tell myself...and only myself because I don’t tell this to anyone until now. Maybe if I did it wouldn’t have taken me so long to realize what actually happened. Here’s the real story: I got my first C in 5th grade. It happened to be in writing because I struggled to write that piece and turned it in late. I saw it coming, but when I saw it in black-and-green I think it did something to me. It was very devastating and discouraging. I haven’t had a report card without one since and that’s extremely embarrassing for me to admit. I used to be a star student. I became careless and had less drive to be that star student. I had a lot going on internally and externally and was excused in many ways because of that. I think I really got comfortable with hiding behind them, because facing the actual problem would have been really hard to do. Because of this, the school aspect of my life has suffered incredulously and that in turn negatively impacted all the other aspects of my life.

I guess, you could say I began to give up on getting back to a place where I was satisfied with my academic standing because it seemed unachievable, and still does. It’s not until something motivates me that I start to gain momentum and get back on my feet pursuing school work and activities. I fall into the same slump over and over and over; it’s a vicious cycle that I can’t seem to free myself of.  The cycle usually goes like this: I get an assignment, something substantial like an essay checkpoint. I spend a few minutes trying to come up with an idea of what I’m gonna do (I’m usually unsuccessful in my endeavors). I tell myself I’ll get around to it later and then for whatever reason, I don’t and it’s not until a few days after it’s due that the pressure sets in and I’m able to finish the assignment. I usually work well under pressure, but my problem is that pressure sets in too late. I have become comfortable, in a sense, with underperforming. When I started high school I recognized that I was entering a world different than the one I was accustomed to in grade school. I set expectations pretty high for myself in a sense. I told myself I got this because confidence is key and I knew that if I went in feeling like I would fail I would. At the same time, I recognized that it wouldn’t all be smooth sailing and that things would get hard at times when it came to school; that I would turn in a handful of assignments late and even get the occasional bad grade. The only thing that mattered was that I would bounce back and get back on track.

Freshman year was a lot harder than I was prepared for it to be. It started off just as great as I thought it would be. My first assignment was in English 1. I had to write a 350-word essay on how my past shaped who I was at the time, which is nothing compared to the 1200 word essay I’m writing now, but back then it seemed like a lot. However, because I was so determined to take high school head on, I didn’t even flinch. That night, I finished it in under an hour and turned it in the next day, no problem. I didn’t have to think about it, I just did it and I was proud of my work. Looking back that might have been the best and most confident I’ve felt in my entire high school experience. As time went on, it got a harder to stay on top of things-and it showed. My grades went from looking the best they had since 5th grade to looking worse than they ever had before in a matter of months. Still, I told myself it was an adjustment period and I was having trouble adjusting. I had plenty of time to grow and make up for it. It’s only my freshman year...but sophomore year didn’t prove to be  any better either…

I decided that junior year was going to different. I wasn’t going to mess up because I couldn’t afford to. I had one last chance to fix all the damage I had done in the past 2 years and I was determined to be successful.  Everything was going to be perfect...and it was...for a month. Then piece by piece it all fell apart, again. I had a lot of things contribute to that. I kept using surface solutions, like completing an assignment or two, but that didn’t stop the work from piling up. I wasn’t getting to the root of the problem and so I fell behind over and over and over again. I play it back in my mind and can see everything slowly unravel, piece by piece dropping like the petals on the wilting rose from Beauty and the Beast. Like it was nothing, the delicate, magical flower my motivation was, wasted away to nothing more than a stem. I couldn’t see that that was the problem, though, which made it hard to it solve it.

I was determined to hold on to and maintain the results of my hard work, but they still suffered a little bit. However, I managed to end the quarter with grades I haven’t seen since my freshman year, which was a little comforting. That comfort was short lived, though, as my grades began to drop like flies again. This was for more than one reason, but one of them was that I got lazy and I’m paying for it as I write this essay, up to my neck in overdue assignments. Only, difference is I am here, admitting out loud that my lack honesty with myself is a problem that I need to acknowledge and work on. Hopefully, now that I’ve done that, I can

move past it and learn how I can break this cycle. I realize there are times where I’ll back into old habits, but I will have to figure out a way to overcome it, which is gonna be easier now that I can see what the problem is. I can now learn and grow from this and it’ll only help me prepare to get through the problems I will come into contact with.

Admittance is the first step. I was taught from an early age that it is very important that I take responsibility for my decisions and actions. Learning that lesson took longer.  

At first, it was easy. All I had to do is tell mommy that I broke the vase accidentally. However, as I got older, the stakes got higher and honesty got more complicated for a lot of other reasons. Sometimes it’s hard to face the truth, especially when it reveals the parts of myself I’m least proud of and intent on keeping under wraps. I found that I even lied to myself… and that can get dangerous, though, because, if I believe it, it can influence the way I see a situation. That snowballed into a mess of things that could have been avoided if I had just been honest with myself.

Corrupt social systems have plagued the U.S. for decades, one of the most frequent and possibly overlooked types being the financial system. A major hub of all the action is Wall St., and their irresponsibility caused the wealth inequality to skyrocket, resulting in the hardship and suffering of the 99% and catering to the 1%. Even after all this, the government has yet to emplace the regulations necessary to fix the problem and stop it in its tracks. In order to begin mending the damage done by Wall St. merchant princes and financiers, the U.S. government must take the people who enabled it in the first place out of power.

  In 2007, Wall St. finance companies began to take part in subprime lending(companies were giving loans to people who were expected to have a great amount of trouble paying it off). These loans were plagued with high interest rates and poor quality collateral, meaning that it was close to impossible to keep up with and poorly insured, and the customers were struggling to pay off their loans. In the 2010 documentary Inside Job, Robert Gnaizda, former director of Greenlining Institute, one of the few companies the fought for public interest, stated:  “Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch were all in on this. Subprime lending alone had increased from 30 billion a year funding to over 600 billion a year in 10 years-they knew what was happening.” The companies were betting against loans they were selling people and then paid every time it failed. These companies-the same ones americans trusted to hold their money and receive sound financial advice from- were literally gambling their customers’ money for odds they created to be in their favor. What’s worse is that those in charge of overseeing these operations, to make sure underground scams like this don’t take place, opted for deregulations.

In December of 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), written by financial lobbyists, was passed. This act banned the regulation of derivatives that allowed the companies to play into the hands of their own success. Any spark of hope that shone through to Congress was extinguished by the moguls who were benefiting from the corruption on Wall St., and anytime a company got close to being held responsible for this injustice they managed to be let off by some technicality left unchecked by the laws they created. Here lies the vicious cycles of corrupt institutions working together to get ahead as quickly and easily as possible, without the slightest regard to the country they are exploiting.

As Wall St. has corrupted the economy over the years, the government has remained stagnant and kept the same people in control of the departments that regulate Wall St. operations. They aren’t held accountable for their lack of morale and integrity and are even reappointed to hold these positions. John Thain, a successor of the previous CEO of Merrill Lynch, made $87,000,000 in 2007, and after the company was bailed out by U.S. tax dollars, the company then handed out millions in employee bonuses. Careless decisions like this resulted in the crash of the economy. These Companies had no cushion money to cover the costs of debt when everything fell apart. Though President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was built on the promise of change, he, too, failed to bring it about as he reappointed former culprits of Wall St. corruption who were perpetrators in America’s financial deficit. . A few of these people include Tim Geithner, who aided Goldman Sachs’s gambling habits, Mark Patterson, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, and Gary Gensler, who helped ban regulations.

If the U.S. government stopped to think about it, they would realize that Wall St. corruption does not just involve deregulation, but the people in charge of overseeing and enforcing them as well. They are the common denominator. The country can not begin to move past this until we are free of those whose selfish ways keep us from moving toward a better future. It has become very clear that whatever these people are or aren’t doing isn’t working for the country and expecting progress to come about without some sort of change is the very definition of insanity, yet we’ve been doing exactly that all this time. We are due for new leadership- leadership that doesn’t have corrupt history and shows promise of allegiance and integrity by putting public interest above their own.

Works Cited

Cole, Juan . “Top 10 Ways the US is the Most Corrupt Country in the World.” Informed Comment, 3 Dec. 2013, www.juancole.com/2013/12/corrupt-country-world.html. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

“The White House.” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

“Sony Pictures Classics presents Inside Job.” Sony Pictures Classic, www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.

Waverly O’Neal, Yo Soy

Waverly O’Neal

Yo soy

Una niña en una familia grande

Una niña con dos hermanas y un hermano

Producto de una nativa americana

Soy como una panda pacífica

Cuando pienso de mi familia….

Veo mis hermanos jugando

Oigo la telenovela favorita de mi tío

Huelo la comida de mis padres

Toco el sedoso pelo de mi mamá

Saboreo los nachos de mi papá

Canto con mi alma

Hablo la lengua de comida y compasión

Corro a mi destino

Sueño con pasión

Somos productos de buenos trabajadores

Somos nativos americanos, Irlandeses, y Isleños

Hablamos Inglés y Tut

Las lenguas de mis antepasados

No somos gente ordinaria, somos extraordinarios

No somos Americanos, pero vivimos en América.

Mi familia es mi hogar.

Mi familia y yo estamos en la encrucijada

Y

After receiving criticism from my classmates I found that the size of the chocolate picture made it hard to make out, to fix this, I made it bigger. Also, the picture of the butterfly turned out pixelated because I had to widen it to fit the slide, so I made it longer to balance out the alterations. The title of my original slide was “ The Wonderful World of Waverly”, but after consulting with my peers I found that the inconsistency in words beginning with “W” caused a subconscious discomfort. In response I changed the title to “Waverly’s Wonderful World” to eliminate the unpleasant vibe. I’m happy with my edited slide and think that the little changes made it all the better. The next time I see a sign I will be able to appreciate all the planning, science, and critical thinking behind the advertisement.

Waverly

Siempre, soy

sociable y amable

a veces, me encanta bailar,

leer y cantar

No soy ni timída

ni aburrida

Yo soy…