A national social issue I would like to see change during the next United States Presidents term is the stance on abortion. Not to get too political but I believe it is a women’s right to choose what she does with her own body. This social issue is one of the most controversial issues in the United States currently and it has been for a while. I am aware with the United States Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade from 1973 where the court ruled in favor of allowing a woman to choose to obtain an abortion without having excessive government restrictions, but since then times have changed and states are trying to ban the rights for a woman to receive an abortion if she chooses to.

After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18th, 2020 many women across America started to fear that their right to an abortion will soon be taken away without her in the U.S. Supreme Court to advocate for them. Many states across the country have been trying to make it difficult and implement restrictions for women who are trying to get an abortion. The state of Louisiana alone has laws that still have restrictions in effect such as insurances not covering abortion care, biased counseling requirements to access abortion, they impose unnecessary waiting periods, and more.

Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court are trying to undermine abortion rights along with anti-abortion legislators at the state level continue to try to implement dangerous and unnecessary abortion restrictions. These laws affect those whose access to abortion care is already limited which include people of color, young people, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, and those who have a low income.

I believe that the next President of the United States should spread a message across and advocate for the rights of women that they have a right to choose to receive an abortion, and that there should not be any unfair or unnecessary laws implemented to make the process of getting an abortion more difficult than it already is. This is not about letting people who made a decision to have unprotected sex to have a child only to realize that they don’t want them anymore, but more for the protection of the lives of innocent women who for example might have been raped and are now carrying a child. Rape is sadly a very common thing to happen in today’s world and women do end up getting pregnant from these incidents. If the right for an abortion is taken away imagine how destroyed a women’s life will become if they are forced to birth and raise the child that their predator impregnated them with. There are also many young girls across the country who may have sexual intercourse at a young age, get pregnant, and then not be able to take care of the child, or the baby’s father might leave because he doesn’t want a child and therefore the young girl would be raising a child alone without ever finishing school, and they believe in their mind that abortion is the best option to go with.

I believe the next president should spread the message of choice for everyone. It is a women’s choice what she does with her body, and states should not be getting newer laws implemented to try to lower these women’s chances of receiving an abortion. The message that should be spread is that there will be no interference with Roe v. Wade, and the rights for a women to choose what she does with her body will be protected.

Everyone knows what a TED talk is, and the basis of what one consists of. I watched a few while I was in High School. If you ask me what they consist of I think there is a common theme in most TED talks. Each TED talk starts off with a compelling story that is based off of real events that happened to them or someone they know. They draw the audience in by sharing their story while trying to connect to the audience in an emotional or logical way. Whenever I have watched a TED talk I noticed that I feel more drawn to their story and feel more open to what they are saying when they share a story about a personal experience.

For the first TED talk I watched, i_stepped_out_of_grief_by_dancing_with_fire, Danielle Torley starts off with an opening statement followed by her directly diving into her childhood story of being trapped in her house that caught on fire when she was only 6 years old which caused her mother to pass away. She drew in her audience by sharing a traumatic story and how she felt after the incident. She described how she had nightmares and how she was trying to get better from all the stress the incident had caused, but how even after years had passed she was in college, and she still had nightmares and terrors about the incident. She went on to talk about how she found a person that participated in dancing with fire with batons. She talked about how it terrified her, but after a lot of practice for months she decided to light the baton on fire ad try it. She did it, and danced with fire. She described how she was terrified, but after more practices she realized her perspective changed. She no longer felt utter fear from fire, but instead felt control over the fire. She said the more time that passed the more the nightmares and panic started to fade. She took something traumatic that happened to her and found a way to move passed it almost two decades later.

The second TED talk, why_children_stay_silent_following_sexual_violence, Kristin Jones starts off her TED talk by opening up about her own personal experience of being sexually assaulted and how it affected her. She draws in her audience by being very personal about what she went through and how it made her feel. Kristin Jones says it took her 22 years to open up about what happened to her mom. She talks about the shame she felt and how she felt it was her fault. She ties all her entire story into how she is now a mother and how she has caught herself telling her children to not let anyone touch them, to not put themselves into a situation where they can be taken advantage in, and to not let anyone do anything to them. She then proceeds to talk about how it is such an unrealistic thing that is said because it makes it seem like they are in control of what happens to them. Jones talks about how as much as she told that to her children it is not necessarily even up to them for what happens, but how it is in fact left up to the person that doesn’t respect boundaries and can’t take no for an answer. She talks about how she heard the message as something that she could have stopped what was happening to her, believed that it was her own fault, and that she was in control of the other persons actions, and she turned it around to how people shouldn’t feel the shame, hatred and blame they feel on themselves when it was not their fault for what happened.

The third TED talk I watched for this blog is different from the first two. In Aparna Nancherla’s TED talk about the_joy_of_taking_out_the_trash, she draws in the audience by talking about taking out the trash in a comical way. She brings in personal experiences and moments of the trash she feels the need to take out. She mentions how it can be the ball of hair on the floor, friends, or even family that you don’t need in your life while also talking about how it can be done to be beneficial for the world in a sense of recycling and reusing. It’s a different TED talk from the other two TED talks I mentioned because the first two shared a very traumatic and personal story and how they got over it and what they believe helped them and connected to the audience in a very deep way. While this TED talk connected to people in a whimsical way about trash and forms of trash in your own life, and how it should be taken out.

All TED talks have a similar compound that set up the basis of what they are talking about and how to appeal to the audience. All three talks I included appealed to the audience in one form or another. Whether it was emotionally or logically, all TED talks share a common theme.

“Halloween is a paradigm shift for a day.” When I first read this statement I automatically agreed with it because in a sense it is true. Halloween is the one night of the year where it is completely okay and acceptable to dress up in any way one wants. There are the ones that dress up as killers, there are the people that dress up in weird but funny costumes, there are the ones that dress up as supernatural beings, there are the ones that dress up as tv show or movie characters, there are the couples that dress up in matching costumes, and then there are the girls that dress up with barely any clothes on with their friends, and no one can say anything about them! Like the quote from the iconic movie Mean Girls, “In the real world, Halloween is when kids dress up in costumes and beg for candy. In Girl World, Halloween is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it.” This quote is very true in my opinion and is also part of the reason why I agree that Halloween is a paradigm shift for a day because it’s like everyone steps into this different world that it is acceptable to dress like anything we want even if there are barely any clothes on a person, and with that to either party the night away, or go around and beg strangers for candy. 

The part of halloween where little children go around and beg for candy from complete strangers is also part of the reason why Halloween is like a paradigm shift for a day. It’s like all the rules and safety measures parents tell their kids to follow throughout their whole life vanishes for the night of Halloween. Parents after a certain age let their kids go off with their friends alone at night, and go up to strangers’ doors, and ask for candy. Then they take the candy and eat it all. It’s like for a day it is completely okay to talk to anyone and everyone, let children out on their own, wear what they want, and then eat so much candy in the night that they get a sugar rush. It is almost like entering a different world for a day, and no one questions it.

The three speeches made by Olivia, Isabella, and Hannah all connect to todays world in a way therefore the connection I am making is temporal. To start off, I will address Olivia’s speech on the 6 feet apart song about COVID-19. Olivia discusses how the song was released May 1, 2020 during the national lockdown after the global pandemic of the Coronavirus hit. She talks about how the whole world had to adjust their way of life, how there are new norms now, and how the world will not be back to normal for a while. The next speech by Isabella is about Guy Fawkes and the fight against the England oppression. Izzy brought in kairos and how it shook England and their modern world with the symbol of a revolution that it started against a persecution of freedom. This connected to civil because of the representation against an oppressive government, and the way if impacted the people by causing the king to become more lenient, opening the eyes of others, and being able to get their message across. The third speech is by Hannah about the company Always and a campaign video they released that tried to break the stigma of a basic stereotype.The video portrayed older men and women mocking on how a girl may run or throw an object, but when the producers asked actual little girls to “run like a girl” or “throw like a girl” they did it with confidence, and completed the tasks well, like normal, and filled with a lot of confidence.

All three artifacts can be connected because they are all problems still brought up into todays world in the use of addressing how these problems never went away. Obviously the COVID-19 pandemic is very much still present in todays world since it only began in early 2020, but it is still around and will be for a long time. We have adjusted our lives to all of these artifacts in a way which I am getting to next. The Guy Fawkes artifact can be compared to the way the world works today in the sense of racism. No matter how hard people try and what they say, the problems our world faces today due to the oppression toward people of color that the government has yet to fix relates to Guy Fawkes in a form. The Black Lives Matter movement has been in the works for a while now and yet nothing has been changed by the government to take control and act on the problems. The world we live in has somewhat adjusted to finding it normal how an officer shoots a black person when they, according to officers, don’t comply. I don’t mean that it is normal, quite the opposite actually, it’s insane to me how it happens and the government has yet to do anything about it, but now we have the Black Lives Matter movement in hopes of change, and that relates to todays world based off of Guy Fawkes. The last artifact of the “like a girl” campaign video is another problem we face today. This artifact, as said by Hannah, shows an ever present patriarchy that men are powerful and women are submissive which affects how women grow up into the world they live in and might accommodate their jobs and the way they live based off of these stereotypical standards. The stereotypical view that degrades a women’s confidence is something we very much still face as a problem in todays world in the workforce, school, and everyday lives.

All three artifacts relate to a present problem in todays world and how it has yet to be fixed, and how they are all connected to something wrong in the world today.

The artifact I decided to use to portray the use of Kairos is the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. This artifact was a very powerful speech given at the exact right time which is what Kairos is all about. The speech affected how people viewed things, changed some perspectives, persuaded people to support the civil rights movement, and showed the power a speech can have when given at the exact time it’s needed.

A good way to think of Kairos and how it affects an audience is to view it as a way it persuades an audience after it is given at a unique time where it may fit. The “I Have a Dream” speech made the point of how African Americans do not enjoy the complete freedom they should due to segregation, discrimination, and poverty. Kairos represents the speakers ability to take advantage of the right time or opportunity to make a convincing argument, and Martin Luther King Jr. did the exact thing. He used the perfect opportunity of talk about what he believes in during a struggling time in the United States to address a larger issue at hand.