I’m Zane Zupan a 15-year-old sophomore from Vermont and I often find myself thinking about just how unique my country is on the global scale. Our power is diversified, we are diversified, we have freedom of speech and equality in voting. Our commerce is relatively free and we have freedom of religion. Our country has astounding national parks and numerous natural resources. We don’t use Celsius or the metric system. We have 5x greater amounts of gun violence than a country with our socioeconomic status should have, the highest rate of opioid overdose in the world, racial and religious tensions seem to be on the rise, the ratio of guns to people is about 21:19, and we incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than any other country. The list goes on for both good, and the bad but is America really on such extreme ends of the scale? Are some of these negatives merely echoed “Juvenoia”? …show more content…
I could have picked a story, a movement or an event to write about, which would be perfectly justified in its own right. Instead, I want to tackle what holds us together on a larger scale. My country has many factors. America is so complex there’s no way to perfectly sum it up in one sentence. Although, there is one word that comes to mind when I think of America. Qualia “the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.” - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy To sum it up, qualia is the indescribable, personal perception of the world around you. We say the sky is blue but can we describe what “blue” was seen to each other? Qualia. Personal perception. No one can truly describe exactly what they experience to the point that the listener will be as informed as if they had experienced it themselves. We all have different ways of processing experiences, explaining those experiences and taking in others experiences. There are endless variables that go into how we end up perceiving everything we