As an Asian American living in the United States, I am continually exposed to the Asian community whether I want to or not. Through social media, group chats, and my worried parents I noticed that during the COVID-19 pandemic where everyone is fighting against the terribly contagious virus, Asian Americans are simultaneously fighting another battle: xenophobia and hate crimes.

Subtle racism against Chinese and Asian people was something I was already accustomed to during the beginning stages of the pandemic. Trump blaming China by calling COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus” and social media memes of Chinese people eating bats were frequently displayed in front of me. To be frank, I thought those memes were pretty funny and so did a lot of my Asian-American friends. 

It wasn’t until a 2 year old and 6 years old were stabbed in a Sam’s Club for being Chinese and “spreading the virus”. It wasn’t until an Asian woman was assaulted by a group of men on a train for coughing. It wasn’t until a group of teenagers attacked a 59-year-old man accusing him of being “Chinese”. It wasn’t until my parents told me to wear a hat and sunglasses in addition to my mask when going to the market so that people won’t recognize me as an Asian, that my friends and I realized “wow crap. This stuff is real.”

The unfortunate truth is that people are too occupied right now to worry about “injustice”. Government officials are busy preparing for the economic disaster caused by the lockdown. Police officers are too busy managing the increasing mass of infected individuals flooding out of hospitals. Citizens are too busy protecting themselves and their loved ones from the reach of the contagion. No one cares about the little Asian girl who got murdered on the streets for “spreading the virus”. We’ll worry about that after we manage this pandemic.

To address this issue Asian artists in France have started posting art on Instagram with the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus. In America, activists are using #IAmNotAVirus.

This artwork by Madame Marilou, a french illustrator is a rhetorical artifact of the activist campaign to stop hate crimes relating to the coronavirus. There are two audiences for this artifact. One is the perpetrators of hate crimes and the other are Asian-Americans who could possibly become victims of hate crimes. 

The interesting thing about this activist campaign is that their real objective is not to educate and aggravators and prevent them from committing hate crimes. This can be deduced by the fact that the woman in the graphic is wearing a mask and portrayed in dark and ominous color tones. The mix of purple, black, red, and white gives off a sinister mood while the mask itself is not a medical mask that patients wear but modeled after a mask used for fashion by Asian celebrities. Another thing to note is that in the western world masks are often associated with criminals. In popular media and news outlets, bank robbers and crime organization members, and most importantly terrorists are portrayed wearing masks to hide their identity.

Additionally, wearing masks is not normalized in the United States as it is in the eastern world. Wearing a mask without being sick, or even being sick is described as “international” by the more open-minded university students, and others describe it as something entirely “foreign”.

The stylish mask colored in red also indicates the target audience to be Asians and Asian Americans because contrary to the dark and unnatural perception of wearing masks in western society, Asians and Asian Americans accustomed to eastern society have rather positive perceptions of masks. Kpop idols and movie stars in Asia wearing masks are known as “airport fashion” and ordinary citizens also use stylish masks in public to filter through the bad air quality prevalent in megacities.

The reason this campaign is targeting Asian-Americans is that a majority of us didn’t take this so-called racism seriously and a lot of us are not even aware that it is happening. News outlets are always saturated with worldwide corona news and the only way Asian-Americans get exposed to this rising xenophobia is through niche internet forums without a lot of exposure. Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate and a popular figure in the Asian-American community faced harsh backlash when he ignorantly told Asian Americans to respond to hate crimes by showing our “American-ness” through patriotism and American pride (I originally wanted to analyze his speech, but it is part of the problem).

These posts that are trending on social media tell Asian-Americans that hate crimes are real, they exist, and even if we wear masks like the girl in the graphic and tell the world “we are not a virus” some will view us negatively and hate crimes will continue to happen. Don’t accept it and embrace it trying to be “the better man”, protect yourself and your family.

I personally did not experience any racism yet, but through these social media posts and the discussions that happened in the comment sections, I learned to be aware of this problem and protect myself. That is the real goal of this campaign, not to educate, change, or fix the problem, but to protect future victims through informative caution.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/andrew-yang-faces-backlash-asian-american-community-op/story?id=69961672

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51294305

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13877013/artists-fight-coronavirus-related-racism-on-instagram

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/how-to-fight-bias-against-asian-americans-covid-19-liu/index.html

Introduction

There was a time in history when products were built to last. Electronics, clothing, academic resources, and many more items used to be expensive, but once obtained, they were repairable and up-gradable. However, ever since GM’s revolutionary idea of planned obsolescence during the great depression, products were no longer built to be durable. They are now made to be cheap and replaceable. Planned obsolescence is an economic and cultural trend that has covertly hidden itself in our fast paced developing world. We see continual development of new technology, new trends in fashion, new textbooks and academic tools that stand as proof of the advancements mankind has been making, and it is not until we stop and look behind us that we see the rubble of toxic, plastic-metal trash that are neither biodegradable nor reusable. In our urgent efforts to enforce sustainability and promote the health of our planet, it is crucial that we look beyond the immediate factors at play, and address the underlying shift in the industrial world that has gone unnoticed: planned obsolescence.

 

Policy Advocated

I am advocating for companies world wide to provide measures to recollect and re-purpose previously released products that are nearing the end of their life cycle. An example of this policy that is already being enacted is Apple’s policy of offering the opportunity to exchange an old IPhone for a discount on the new IPhone the customer is purchasing. This is kind of ironic because the battery life of Apple’s IPhones is one of the most famous examples of planned obsolescence and the reasoning behind their exchange policy is because their planned obsolescence tactics did not work enough for customers to continually buy new IPhone models, their policy is actually a really good way of reducing electronic waste which is really harmful to the environment as they take forever to biodegrade.

 

Audience and Stakeholders

The main audience for this issue brief are the climate change and sustainability activists that are constantly in conflict with large corporations that are causing harm to the environment. What many of them do not realize is that they may be unconsciously affected by planned obsolescence and every time they buy a new machine or device because their old one broke and it costs more to fix it than to buy a new one, they are contributing to the harm done to the environment. Stakeholders also include corporations because it is in their best interests to continue making profit, and unless a better way is suggested, they will likely continue to apply planned obsolescence to their products. Finally, another audience and stakeholder that this issue brief addresses are governments because they are the ones trying to balance both sides and come up with a solution that addresses both problems.

 

Exigence

The exigence of this policy is that currently the U.S. has a massive e-waste problem. Colossal amounts of electronics that are getting “recycled” by consumers in preference to new and better ones end up being piled up in landfills and warehouses. These piles of electronic trash are a massive health hazard to communities nearby as the lead, cadmium, chromium, and other materials in degrading electronics are not only polluting the environment and wildlife but also extremely dangerous to humans if it gets into drinking water and other methods of human consumption like air. Additionally, what will make the straw hating activists go crazy is that 17% of electronic waste contains plastic that does not degrade and cause harm to wildlife that consume broken bits and pieces.

Is nuclear energy good or bad?

This is a frequent question that pops into mind as we venture on the quest for sustainable, renewable energy. When the idea of harnessing nuclear energy to power our cities first came into light, it was a radical and extraordinary concept. The idea of taking nuclear fission, the same process that the sun uses to power the entire solar system and basically all life on planet earth, and implementing them into our energy system? Well that was spectacular. The benefits of nuclear energy was also phenomenal. The initial construction of these gigantic plants were extremely costly. Yet, once they were built, these plants provided us with energy cheaper than any we could obtain through other traditional sources like oil, gas or coal, let alone the extremely costly and high maintenance renewable energy techniques we currently have.

Additionally, the electricity generated by nuclear power plants are consistent. Unlike renewable energy courses like solar and wind energy that largely depend on the occurrence of specific natural phenomenon to produce their energy, nuclear energy can be relied on as a stable source for daily packets of energy. This is especially important for proceedings that require constant energy. For example, hospitals that require constant energy to keep patients in critical conditions alive and internet servers that host millions of data coming in and out cannot function with an unstable energy source that cannot guarantee energy at all times of the day.

Finally, compared to other traditional energy sources, the environmental affects of nuclear energy is relatively low. The great amounts of smoke coming out from the top of these plants are really just steam that has been created through heat during the energy derivation process.

Yet, in recent popular media, nuclear waste is being antagonized and being clumped together with the rest of the “traditional” energy sources that are harmful to the environment. Many climate change advocacy groups have been protesting the construction and maintenance of nuclear power plants across the world. There is a lot of fear in the public regarding nuclear energy as it involves technology that can be dangerous to control. After the news of a nuclear power plant being meltdown in Japan after taking too many hits from an unexpected Tsunami, the radioactivity got out and contaminated the entire region, ruining the area for many years to come and even harming the people that lived there.

Adding to that, Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident cost the lives of nearly 30,000 people and even now more than 2.5 million Ukrainians are still struggling with health problems related to radioactivity from that incident. People that do not really know about the technology behind nuclear energy prefer to push this technology away and advocate for renewable energy technology like solar, wind, and ocean powered techniques as they have a much better public image than nuclear energy. Nor, are there any risks associated with these forms of energy that nuclear energy hold.

But here’s the thing, as Energy Informative puts it “Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of harnessing energy.” Being able to control atomic fusion can lead to us achieving nearly unlimited energy. Thus in the long term aspect of things, the scientific research for nuclear energy must go on, and we must keep on developing and refining our techniques.

Another reason that nuclear energy currently have such a bad image is that it is not renewable energy source in the strict sense of the definition. Currently, nuclear energy depends on the use of uranium which the earth only has for about 80 more years of energy production. Although other atoms could be used to carry out this process such as Thorium, it still depletes a natural resource to perform and is not renewable.

Plus, as mentioned earlier, nuclear energy is also not perfectly good for the environment. The environmental detriments that nuclear energy techniques do possess are the possibilities of nuclear waste contaminating the environment when not contained properly. This is the biggest challenge that we must continue to struggle with, but it is a challenge we must face and overcome. Simply trying to replace the entire world’s energy source with horribly costly sustainable energy processes is impossible, and as awesome as it is for us to conceptualize the development of renewable techniques that are also perfectly cost-effective, it just isn’t an option right now. Hence, please do more research before you condemn nuclear energy as bad and start hating the government and scientists for it, because without nuclear energy, we would be destroying the environment ten-fold with toxic oil and gas energy.

 

Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/

 

The steam machines were the first invention that really required us to use energy throughout the planet. Different mechanical devices adapted the steam engine to be capable of work that previously worked many laborers and resources to perform. These steam engines were universally powered through coal as it was more convenient and effective than other sources such as wind and water. These steam engines were mainly installed into locomotives for transporting large masses of people. It was a coal powered steam engine that was first installed onto the world’s first electric generator which (through the hard efforts of Thomas Edison) provided the first electric lights to Wall Street and the New York Times.

Then came along petroleum. Petroleum was something that really did not have any use until we discovered that they could be processed into gasoline and used to power internal combustion engines which derive energy from pressures caused by the burning of fuel. These combustion engines were installed into cars that provided transportation on an individual basis. As electric starters got incorporated into cars, they went on to encompass more demographics such as women to utilize cars as a means of transportation.

World wide energy usage was growing at an exponential rate companies rushed to provide cheaper and more effective energy to the public without much thought into their environmental impacts. Nuclear power plants that harnessed the immense potential of nuclear energy created a certain danger to the environment and the communities within it as if they exploded due to some time of mistake, then they would pollute the region for many decades to come and deem the area an inhabitable radioactive zone.

Not only that but when troubles with the oil-producing Arab nations occurred, the U.S. started fracking the underground of the environment. The exact implications of fracking are unknown to this day due to how recently the procedure came about. Yet it has shown instances of harming the environment such as contaminating drinking water and disrupting the underground ecosystem.

As can be seen, clean energy really did not become an issue until the 1950-1970s. Although even back then, the issue was not as urgent as it is now. As we developed new ways to obtain energy in cheap and useful ways the more harmful our methods became to the environment. The immense amount of greenhouse gasses that we send off to our atmosphere for the constant use energy in our homes, our workplaces, and our every day lives, are starting to show consequences through global climate change.

The instances of the poles melting, species dying out, the ocean level rising, and the heightened occurrence of natural disasters has alerted us enough to the point that a general consensus can be reached on the fact that we need to change our energy practices. The biggest issue with this is that changing our sources of energy is easier said than done.

New sources of energy that offer clean alternatives such as hydro, wind, and solar energies take advantage of naturally replenished, “renewable” sources for energy. But even then, the biggest problem is changing our current energy consumption processes. Even with all these new additions to the energy source squad, the main sources of energy we have right now such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal offer energy at cheap prices that we cannot offer to give up.

Many industries with large corporations will simply not be able to handle the switch from nonrenewable to renewable energy sources if suddenly forced to do so. All of these corporations will unfortunately, go bankrupt as the switch will require them do spend a much larger percentage of their funds on energy consumption. Not only that, but everyday people will find it difficult to keep up with the heightened energy prices. Even now people complain about the price of electricity fees, imagine if they were to double or even triple in prices.

Thus, the solution to the climate change problem is pretty clear. As of now, we do not have renewable energy sources that can offer energy as cheaply and abundantly as our non-renewable energy sources. No amount of protesting or rallying will make way for large corporations to make the change, and if we do end up using the power and influence of the government to force them to make a change, they will all go bankrupt. So the only answer we have left is this: we need to develop more sources of renewable energy, ones that are cheaper and more effective than what we have now.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/short-history-energy

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/what-is-energy/sources-of-energy.php

https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources

Work Distribution:

Bella:  Researching specific sub-topic within broader chosen topic and presenting this information into our documentary skillfully and appropriately. Contribute to the production and post-production of the documentary through filming, voice-overs, and interviews as well as editing our footage, adding necessary visual aids, and effects.  

 

Hannah: Research on a specificality among the topic chosen, provide evidence for reporting claims on either side of the controversy. Cover some of the beginning history of either topic whether that be beginning acceptance of the insanity plea or the beginning of earlier disagreements among the use of vaccinations. Help film parts of the documentary whether that be of one of us reporting the information or taking interviews of outside opinions. Will help with editing as necessary.

 

Joseph: Compiling research for chosen topic– especially in regards to discussing the societal/moralistic ramifications of the controversy, working on filming video for the documentary filming along with editing, contributing to the writing of the script.

 

Reuben: Find key events and case examples of the chosen topic. Embed these into the documentary and organize them to match the flow of the documentary. Ensure that each key event and case example is clearly presented and explained so that it matches the arguments being made. Edit pictures, videos, and interviews into the documentary with the use of special effects to allow for the optimal transitions for each artifact. Additionally, contribute to the filming of the original content for use in the documentary.

 

Idea 1: Insanity Plea – Although the Insanity Plea is used in less than 1% of defense cases, there is widespread controversy over the misuse in claiming the insanity plea– namely in cases where the defendant is not criminally insane. As a group, we would like to explore this controversy throughout its history. In doing so, we plan on discussing the origin of the plea, describing the differences between insanity and mental illness, along with exploring cases of the insanity plea being used (and misused) in court. Cases like this may have resulted in the defendant being admitted into mental health hospitals even though they fail to require true medical attention. We also will cover the history beginning with the early use of the insanity plea in courts and describing multiple large cases when this was used such as the Susan Smith or Andrea Yates cases. 

Idea 2: Anti-Vax – Though the “Anti-Vax” movement has recently entered the global spotlight, the movement has roots seeping all the way from the mid-18th century. In documenting the history of this controversial stance, our group plans on discussing the origins of the movement along with its recent foray into the modern conscience (as a result of a growing societal skepticism.) We will discuss how the public has reacted to and reorganized around the growing popularity of the movement, along with its societal ramifications.