It's only 2:00 p.m, but it feels like my day has been a lot longer.

In my 9:00 Sociology of Sport class, we watched a couple of videos on Nike sweatshops in Vietnam. One of the videos was a "48 Hours" special which was your pretty standard fare. The other clip we watched was from Michael Moore's "The Big One" where he manages to speak with NIKE CEO Phil Knight.

From 10:00 - 1:20ish I worked with Sommer in helping people register to vote. There's a little competition going on to see who can get the most people registered, but I am mainly doing this just to get people registered to vote. When summer hits, I plan on going door to door and getting as many people as possible registered in Denton County. I hope going door to door isn't some kind of overly ambitious goal of mine. The way I see it, I'll do as much as I can, and that's all I can really do. I won't OVER exert myself too much.

As I was leaving the table, I got into a "discussion" with one of Sommer's friends about socialism. Although not an uber hard core "Socialist," I do agree with many socialist principles.

I think that most people at their core have a little bit of a socialist tendency to them. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say, "Baseball players make too much. Why can't we give that money to teachers or to social workers." And when most people talk about the homeless situation in American, they wonder why there even is a "situation." A lot of the people that I talk to wonder why in a country as wealthy as ours, there even is a homeless "situation" considering it would be relatively inexpensive to make sure that everyone has a roof over their heads.

I've always seen myself as a compassionate type of person. Heck, I can't even kill a bug when it's on my floor. So maybe I'm naive to think that everyone holds a compassionate world view similar to mine. But sometimes the capitalist line is hard to swallow.

It's hard to read that we're the most powerful and wealthy country on the planet, yet we can't ensure that people aren't living on the streets. We're one of the countrys that has one of the highest number of people who volunteer their time, but our institutions are structured in such a way that some people just get left behind.

Sure we talk a good game, but when it comes down to putting our money where are mouth is, we're too busy choking on the bills.

I don't like bashing capitalism because honestly, I think the best system would be a combination of socialism and capitalism. No one is saying that you can't have money, and that you can't work your way up the ladder. All I think is needed is a little "social accountability." By that I mean, that maybe some of the fat could be cut out of some the over-bloated budgets, to help out some of the other programs that need a little bit of extra help.

A common argument is that the federal government isn't the best institution that could help bring about these types of broad social changes. Maybe the people who say that are right. But usually an alternative isn't provided and usually that argument is more of an "applicability" issue rather than a "shouldn't happen" type of thing.

The main gist of my "argument" outside earlier revolved more around how we value work and workers in our society. My main thesis being that our society would function just fine without the Texas Rangers or the Dallas Cowboys. But our society would crumble within minutes without Garbage collectors, janitors, electricians, etc etc. So I asked "where the value is." Because it appears to me that it's more about priorities than value. In our capitalist society, our priorities lie more with the big anomalies like movie stars, sports stars, singers, and even some CEO's, than they do with jobs of of real, concrete value to society.

I think that as a society, we owe it to the people who do the menial work to make sure that they are valued monetarily AND valued as an integral part of our society. Too often, it seems that we marginalize people who don't work white collar jobs. We look down our noses at people who stand outside in the freezing cold at the day labor sites we pass on our way to work.

I always get a kick out of how people justify how we prioritize certain jobs over others. We tend to think that just because someone has put in certain requirements like school or enough baseball practice to make the major leagues, that they deserve great financial gain while someone who works a "menial" job like trash collector or plumber doesn't deserve to be rewarded financially because they didn't put in the same requirements. To most who make this argument, they make the assumption that those who go to schooling for years and years have worked "harder" than those who go to jobs that don't require school.

To me, the answer lies in how you define "hard work." Is it not hard work picking up trash? Or being a janitor for a school? Isn't that hard work as well?

What REALLY got me going in that debate earlier, was the guy I was debating made an assumption that most of the people who work jobs like trash collectors or janitorial jobs do so because they have some kind of prior criminal offense. THAT sent me over the top probably. I didn't get all buckwild on him or anything, and think I was courteous enough to him, but it was UBER HARD to bite my tongue and not go all ape shit. Statistically, most people who work jobs such as those, are just your basic hard working people who want nothing more than to work a decent job and provide for their families. It really sends me through the roof when people assume that just because someone works a job like that, they do so because of punitive reasons.

Sorry to get all "manifesto" style over here, but I really started thinking after I left the debate I was engaged in earlier. Thought I'd share some of those thoughts here.

-Karl Marx