Crips And Bloods ;; K-PAX

In Psychology (as my last few posts have started with) we have watched more documentaries than I have already stated. One more, that my writing will be based on, is titled Crips and Bloods Made In America. Before you watch it, I must warn you it has some fairly mature themes and images. I would also like to add that the first song in it is great, by my opinion at least. This documentary covers the creation of how the Crips gang, and the Bloods gang formed.

We also watch part of the movie K-PAX, which is amazing. It features an individual who has come from another plannet to visit earth. He sees humans to be a very odd species, and questions many of our actions. It does a very good job at pointing out what we see to be normal, may not be what is correct.

But fist, Crips and Bloods Made In America. This documentary was hard for me to relate to, because all the situations that were presented have never directly affected or occurred to me. I have never been denied joining the boy scouts (or tried to for that matter), I have never been given a time where I had to go somewhere just to be beaten on, and I have never been given food and shelter in return for going to a rival neighborhood and shooting several of the rival gang's members.

These are three major stages of the creation and continuation of gang activity in Los Angeles.

Innitaly, there was a large amount of racism towards individuals of African American decent. If you had a dark skin colour, you were not able to join any clubs. You could not participate in any community activities. You were excluded. What do individuals do when they are excluded? They create their own clubs. That is exactly what happened, however these clubs were meant to be for those of African American decent only.

There was nothing wrong with creating an exclusive group like this, or at least that is what they thought. Due to the predigest around the individuals in the clubs, they were persecuted simply for being who they were, where they were. This created a large amount of aggravation between the clubs that had formed and the police.

Naturaly, the groups became increasingly violent because of this. If there was a disagreance between two groups, there would be a fist fight expected. If you were told to show up somewhere at a given time to get beaten up, you had to go there. Everyone in the area would know about it, and if you didn't show up they would find you and it would be much worse. Gang mentality began to take over, and these clubs became more like organized gangs.

Now to skip ahead in time. Violence always escalates, and now fist fights have become replaced by shoot outs.

What can we learn from this? Well since it has already happened, there is nothing we can do about the past. What can be done to stop the criminal activity right now? Honestly, I don't have any quick ideas. It is still happening, and it is still escalating. One individual in the documentary states that 'if you are born in the 'hood, you die in the 'hood.' If there was an opportunity to go back and change something significant, the racism is what started this all.

What is racism? It is a way to impose power over a group, even though the oppressing group has no power over the oppressed group. This can be viewed as a normal situation through history, and it is a great model for those in power as long as they do not care what they do. Misfortunately, there should be care for everyone, from everyone's perspective.

How has this become normal? This is just one example of what is considered normal, to not be the best way. K-PAX looks over many aspects of being human and our society. Society looks to be a very flawed system. I did not get to see much of this movie but I think I caught the idea of it.

This could easily relate to my previous post about mirror neurons, the second post I posted today? I've had to post far too much today, but that's the price of procrastination. Anyways, the post about mirror neurons is not too far behind this one. Humans are made for empathy, to help eachother, and not to harm eachother.

What we do in our every day lives should be analyzed. We should analyze it, other should analyze it, and perhaps our society needs a bit of refining. There are so many flawed systems in our society (Perhaps a quick look at some RSA Animate videos will show you this if you do not think this already, see my mirror neurons post for a link) that need to be fixed.

Vortex B wrote on the bored for us to write down (I suspect few people did), "Just because we have been socially conditioned to view something s normal, doesn't mean it is necessarily a natural processes." Society has many cases of emotions backfiring on humans as a group of individuals.

*Bugworlds