Documentaries

I have a habit of watching TV when I’m eating or folding laundry. Keeps me from getting bored; especially when I’m folding laundry. Normally, I'll watch a series I really enjoy or a movie, but recently I’ve watched a few documentaries which I think were well worth the time spent watching them.

The first one was “Requiem for the American Dream.” It was an interview with Noam Chomsky discusses wealth in this country. One of the most interesting points I thought he made was when he pointed out that back at the end of WWII, this country didn’t have a lot of money, but education was fully funded. We were even sending our veterans to college on the G.I. Bill. Now we’re one of the richest nations on earth, but education is woefully underfunded.

Here’s a link to a trailer for it. I know it’s available on Amazon.com and Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyFSvnLnCZ0

I just discovered that if you let the trailer run, part one will play with English audio and Spanish subtitles. I know part two is right behind it, but I’m not sure if it’s the rest of the video or not.  

I also found an official website for “Requiem for the American Dream,” and some articles. Here are the links for those:

http://requiemfortheamericandream.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-berkowitz/requiem-for-the-american-_b_9203578.html

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/requiem-for-the-american-dream-2016

There are more if you want to look, but I didn’t want to overwhelm you.

I would add here that college is no guarantee of a job. I was told that when I started college. I also read an article recently about a college graduate who said he started out at an entry level job in his field and some companies are now doing their own training for entry level jobs. So, unless you seriously want to enter the medical, engineering or legal fields, or something that really does require a high level of training, you may be better off skipping college altogether.

The next documentary was, “The Human Experiment.” This one was about the chemicals we encounter in our daily life and how they affect us. The reality is that there are tons of chemicals in everyday items, but the companies that produce those items don’t care. They literally spend millions lobbying to keep things the way they are.  Those chemicals can not only make you sick, as in give you cancer, they can also affect your ability to have children. Those health issues have gone up in recent years, among others. If you finally manage to back the chemical companies into a corner over their products, they have several defenses in place. The worst of which is blaming us, the customer. They’ll say we had choices. When it comes to things like cigarettes, yes, we have choices. When it comes to a lot of other products, furniture and toys for example, our choices are limited, unless we can make our own. This is really awful. There are chemicals in virtually everything we buy. Harmful chemicals, but the chemical companies don’t care as long as they’re making money. And the worst part is that they’re completely untested.

This is a link to a trailer on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvhB5hkIjc

You can also find an official site for the movie here:

http://thehumanexperimentmovie.com/

I also found a documentary titled, "Farmageddon." I know, interesting title, but what was really interesting to me is that it showed how the U.S.D.A. and state departments of agriculture aren't truly looking out for people like you and me, but rather using their position to protect the interests of big corporate food producers. How? By harassing and intimidating small, independent farmers that might compete with the big corporations.

In this film you will see that use local police and swat teams to enforce their decisions, regardless of the harm they cause to the farmers and their families. You will see perfectly healthy sheep loaded into a truck at 5:30 in the morning during a blizzard, because they "might" have mad cow disease despite the fact that showed no signs of it and every blood test given to them in the course of a year was negative for the disease. And that's just what they did to one small, independent farmer. There are other examples of abuse of their power as well.

It also shows how eating the right foods can help our bodies heal. I hope you check it out.

Here are some links to this movie:

http://farmageddonmovie.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p1HYgQj938

The last documentary, but certainly not the least is titled, “Race to Nowhere.” This one was about education – or what we call education. It highlights how education has become all about testing and homework. Students are being assigned so much homework in middle school and up, that they literally don’t have time for anything else. To make things worse, if students want to get into a top college, they must have outside activities such as sports or volunteering in the community. I’ve known for a while now that our education system is not what it should be or could be, but this shows that it’s worse than I realized.  The best thing I saw was that one teacher for an AP class realized that you couldn’t teach everything “required” in a year, so he cut the homework in half. He said that when he did so, test scores went up.

Here’s a trailer for the film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uem73imvn9Y

Here’s also a link to the official site:

http://www.racetonowhere.com/

If you can watch these, I hope you do. I found them informative and enlightening about our current systems and way of life.