1/30/15- Maya Angelou and Nancy Mairs Discussions

This week we talked two pieces that both discussed discrimination. Though wildly different, Angelou discusses racial discrimination while Mairs discusses her disability, both authors discuss discrimination that occurs because of something that can't be changed about a person. A lot of this discrimination still exists today and there are movements broadcasted all over the media and the internet dedicated to stopping them. Buzzfeed, for example, makes most of its money by proclaiming itself a liberal, feminist news corporation that prides itself on recruiting members of that nature. Many of Buzzfeed's actors and directors have openly stated that they are activists-those who are committed to seeing a change in the social structure of the world. I think it is interesting that issues that were popular during the Civil Rights era and issues that are prominent today are still present in a different form. I feel like there was a gap from the 1980's through the 2000's where activism wasn't as prominently displayed in the media as it was through the 70s or today in the 2010s. Nowadays, we have more and more people outwardly stating themselves as strong feminists versus anti-feminists and liberals versus libertarians versus conservatives, brands that people give themselves that I didn't really hear a lot of during that gap of social issue awareness. Issues are being fought for in a new, current wave of activism. "Periods" and "Ages" in history are not necessarily denoted as such until after they occur (except for that F. Scott Fitzgerald who named his own time period the "Jazz Age"-like seriously dude?)Especially with the recent gay marriage ruling I feel that we are currently living in another period of Civil Rights history that has yet to be written into the history books. I wonder what we're going to call it?