The Thesis of my blogs...

So, probably like many other people in this class, when I learned that I needed to go and look through my blog posts and figure out what my thesis was, I thought: there isn't one. Everything I wrote was unconnected. every blog had a separate, random topic. However, after a while, I did manage to pick out a common theme in many of my posts. A lot of them tended to be philosophical in nature, which surprised me, because to my knowledge, I'm not philosophical (or at least, I wasn't). Some of my blog posts truly were random and unconnected to my other posts in any way, shape or form, but a lot of them, regardless of whatever issue or topic or event that I was talking about, tended to focus on whether I thought that it was good or bad. It seems that I like to put things sortof in a moral context, deciding that they are either good or bad, and if they're bad, I like to talk about what I think it should be.
  In one post, I talked about whether permanent criminal records are fair, and whether they wind up having a greater negative impact than a positive one. In another post, I talked about how it was good that mankind didn't have ultimate control over the course of their lives, because we would inevitably choose to avoid the pain and hardship that are so necessary for our growth and development.  I also talked about how excessive fear and paranoia can have very large negative impacts on our society, and motivate people to do unfortunate things. I cited the Salem witch trials and the communist scares as examples from history of why we need to be careful not to let our fear of terrorism or other things take us too far. I also liked to talk about economics and technology, and the positive or negative impacts that are occurring due to those things, though I'm certainly not an expert in either economics or technology.
  In short, I like to take basically whatever topic I find interesting, analyze it, and decide whether it's a good or a bad thing. I also like to muse about how it could be made into a good thing if it isn't already, and how it could be better if it is.
  I feel that this is an important viewpoint to take, because sometimes as a society we get so wrapped up in things or the possibilities of things that we fail to step back and think carefully about the real impact that something will have. Something that at first seems to be really exciting, amazing, and full of potential could wind up having a truly negative impact, if we aren't careful. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to develop new things and progress as a society, or that we should always be afraid of new things. I'm all for progress. Rather, I'm saying that we should take the time to consider more carefully the things we do, and think about whether they really are good or bad. A quote comes to mind from the movie Jurassic Park, where John Hammond and his company successfully brought dinosaurs back to life. Despite it being a truly amazing and exciting feat of science, one of the characters, Ian Malcolm, thinks that dinosaurs are a very bad idea, and says to Hammond: "You were so concerned about whether or not you could, that you never stopped to think about whether or not you should!" As we all remember from the movie, the park was a failure and the dinosaurs wound up eating a lot of people. Definitely not a good thing. So, I guess that's the point of my thesis, that we need to think more about whether or not the things we do as a society will be good or bad. We don't want to create more proverbial people-eating dinosaurs. :P