Words. Easy to write but sometimes impossible to say. So writing will be my way to speak them.
I have so much to say but can never seem to find the words to say what I need. What makes it harder is I can see the words. All of them. I cannot explain how I feel because I do not know and I hate how I can't figure that out.
I am everywhere, moving at a million miles per hour and slowing down would be a great benefit to me. But I do not know how to put on the brakes, they are broken. I keep moving so I don't have to focus on what is blurring by my face and in hopes that I can ignore what is really going on around me. The downfall of this is the fact that I am letting a lot of nice things fly by and not stopping to appreciate them. I may not stop and take my time to fully soak in everything but I do see everything.
I see the way things work and the way things change. Something I have learned that has really forced
me to think differently is the story that the look in someone's eyes can tell you. You can see when someone is upset, when someone is happy, and when someone is feeling. My eyes could tell you more than you could ever want to know. But only if it was that easy, unfortunately it's not. I see the hurt, I see the disappointment and it kills me. Not the type of eyes I like to see. I want dilated pupils glistening in the light not the look that stares back at me or the eyes that dart away from mine.
I wish I knew how to fix that. I wish that was something I knew how to change. But that isn't something we are taught in school. It is something we learn in this thing called life and life will never be easy.
But the moral of this story is I have the words to say. I just don't know how to say them, but look into my eyes and you will know.
Just recently Facebook has released 56 new gender options for users to pick from. It is no longer just the typical male or female that it used to be. Some of the new options include; Agender, Female to Male,
Intersex, Two-spirit and even Neither.(Click here to see the remainder of the list) They also have made users be able to change the pronoun in which they are referred to publicly. You are now able to choose “he/his, she/her, or the gender-neutral they/their” as your options to better suit your preference.
As it was reinstated in an article by CNN, Facebook’s main drive in doing this is so that people may better express their own identity to the world. We live in a world with many different types of people and facebook directly interacts with all of them as well. As this may be a touchy topic for some people, facebook even gives the option to hide, or keep private, their specific gender selection with certain people. Constant facebook users have been in debate with facebook about making these changes and they finally delivered.
I overall think this is a really good idea. Like I stated earlier, not one person is the same and people now a days are really open about letting people know that they are different and what better way to do that besides facebook? We all look at each other’s profiles when we get a new friend request and see what they are all about and who they are. For some people this may make that task a lot easier. As I see this as a really good idea, I still don’t understand why people are limited to the only 56 options? Why not leave a blank space and allow someone to just type in what they feel their gender is? Yes this may start a new batch of problems and a bunch of people just making thing up, but isnt facebook supposed to be a way to express ourselves? If they wanted to go ahead and just leave it open to peoples interpretations of themselves I feel that there would need to be minimal regulation on what people put in the box and have some tech guy checking those out and filter through what’s appropriate and what’s not. At the same time, if they are going to start to regulate gender specifications I think someone needs to take a look into all the people posting mirror pic selfies. But that’s a whole different can of worms.
I think it is safe to say that we all know someone in our lives that smokes or have smoked in the past. I personally have had family members who have engaged in the activity and friends who do the same. I’m not here to tell them that they are wrong for doing so but to hopefully reassure them about the potential health hazards that come along with the activity and to answer the overall question of; should cigarette smoking be banned.
First I want to start this off by talking about some of the background that comes along with smoking and then get to the question at hand. As stated by the CDC, cigarettes kill 480,000 people every year and that number continues to rise as the activity becomes more popular. Also stated in a different article, which I thought was really moving about cigarettes was that;
"They kill more people than cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and all other illegal drugs combined."
That is truly unbelievable to grasp the amount of people
that die every year. To gain hold of how many people that is, imagine losing
the entire city of Sacramento, California. There are around 475,000 people
living there. It is unimaginable to loose that many people every year.
Looking up facts on the hazards of smoking is a scary thing.
We know its bad, we know that the chemicals that are placed inside of them are
bad, but yet people continue to smoke. Some of the few most notable ones are:
Chemicals inside cigarettes
Cyanhydric Acid (was used in gas chambers)
Methanol (used as rocket fuel)
Arsenic (lethal poison)
Nicotine (used as a herbicide and insecticide)
DDT (insecticide)
Carbon Monoxide (found in exhaust fumes)
Vinyl Chloride (used in plastic materials)
With all those chemicals being mixed together the lead to a
very unhealthy mix of complications that can come along with it. Some of the
major diseases are:
Cardiovascular disease
Cancer
COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
All of which can lead to and early and premature death.
Smoking has been made out to be the “cool” thing to do by a
lot of Hollywood productions and work that comes out of there. As it has been
made to be a popular thing to do there are lots of work to try and counteract
those attempts. I will always remember this anti-smoking ad I saw on TV one
day.
The constant debate of if smoking should be banned is
something that will always be around. A cool site called debate.org asks normal
people their opinions on topics and the one they have going on this current
issue has a split of 50-50.
I feel personally you can’t and shouldn’t ban smoking. Yes,
it is bad for you and ultimately can lead to you dying early but this is not something
I feel can be contained. If we are to ban it based off the fact that it is
unhealthy for us then there are a lot more things that need to be banned as
well. As I do not condone the activity of smoking and would hope my loved ones wouldn’t
do it as well I can only try and bring the negative aspects to light and hope
they can see what this can do to you.
