The "Kram" (Review)

The Olin Library entrance.

To begin with, I have horrible sleep ethic. I woke up this morning and found there to be light penetrating from the window. Just like yesterday, I sprang up from my bed and looked at the microwave only to see that I awoke much too early--5:30 AM to be exact. I need to get my circadian rhythm in check or start shutting the blinds. Moving on, I fell asleep and woke up at 7:20 AM and followed my regular morning routine. I went to the RPCC and ate breakfast with Sue and eventually Carla who came few minutes later and we all began to review some of the first-week philosophers including Christ, Paul the Apostle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Not too long after we all migrated to Goldwin Smith Hall where we were joined by a girl in our class named Sophie who also happens to be from the Bay Area. Today's lecture covered quite a large portion of Lockean ideas. This included, the natural rights, "negative" freedom, the secular state, even the Declaration of Independence and more. Natural rights, simply explained are the rights that all humans are born with that are unalienable, like the right to life, liberty and property. Specifically speaking, every human owns his/herself and whatever work they put into, becomes an extension of oneself and therefore property. One can sell property and when wealth comes into play, then one person can accumulate a lot of wealth very quickly. He also explained how we live in a Lockean world where basically most of the U.S. government is based off of what he believed in. 

In our discussion today, we went over just about all things of importance, discussed in the lecture. When I say "things of importance" I mean anything that's going to be on the test. I remember asking a question during the discussion on whether or not Locke actually cared for the well-being of the poor and instead of having my question answered a whole new discussion practically emerged. I figured that Locke didn't actually care much for the poor and instead cared more about the safety of the rich. 

Walked through the rain today.

During lunch our cohort combined with another class group and we all ate lunch together at Trillium. There at Trillium we decided on meeting up later to review everything for the upcoming exam. As for the guest speaker today, his story was rather interesting. The lawyer from downtown, Seth Peacock didn't care about school when he was in high school. Instead he allowed himself to receive bad grades because he knew that the school would still move him up to the next grade. Eventually he turned his act around and went to Queen's Community College in NYC and got accepted into the Cornell law school. He said he didn't know what he wanted to do at first, but he knew he wanted to be a lawyer. I found his pure motivation to accomplish whatever he set his mind to as inspiring. 

The study group.

The case he talked about was one of police brutality and harassment. The crude details are, a lesbian woman was slightly intoxicated and stole a single french fry from waiter that was walking by and was kicked out of the restaurant. While outside, the police came and arrested her for not moving out of the way. Long story short, the officer in the police car, driving her to the station, maneavured the car in such a manner that the woman became bruised and was also harrassed by the police officer on a sexual orientation basis. The woman's case was never accepted into court and the officer along with another corrupt one, roam the streets without being served justice to this day. It's absolutely ridiculous, and she only received about $50,000 from an insurance company. 

Our new group studied at the Olin Library, specifically a few floors down in a study room. It was very productive at first, but then we became progressively distracted with the power of the internet but later in the day we would prove to be more productive. A little after dinner, we all went to the 2nd floor conference room of Mary Donlon and an initial group of ~15 was present. It eventually decimated to 7 by 9:30 PM and we covered everything there was to be covered. Thankfully we could literally "kram" everything into a time frame of around a few hours and finished it off with cookies. We all decided that we would definitely meet up again prior to the final. Time for the test in less than 9 hours from now, BYL--blog you later.