The Foundations of Charity

The Foundations of Charity

The earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, and subsequent devastation there, resulted in an outpouring of humanitarian relief. Most people do what they can by giving as they are able. But sadly, there are times when the good that we thought we were doing is undermined by others exploiting our generosity.

Society and Culture: Who Needs A Hero?

Society and Culture:
Who Needs A Hero?

The notion of the hero figure has long been part of popular culture. Does the prevalence of this recurrent theme over the generations indicate a deep-seated hope people have that someone will take action, come to their rescue and save them from global peril? Or in our enlightened age do we prefer our own answers to the world's complex problems?

Special Report: A Tribute to Fathers

 Special Report:
A Tribute to Fathers
 

CPIPO Report:
Researching the Role of Fathers in Pregnancy Outcomes
In May, 2010, the Commission on Paternal Involvement in Pregnancy Outcomes (CPIPO), convened by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, published policy recommendations for improving research, policy and practice aimed at promoting father involvement in pregnancy and family health. Noting that infant mortality for African Americans is more than double the rate of white Americans, the CPIPO seeks to identify and overcome barriers to paternal involvement in pregnancy, develop public guidelines for research, policy, education and practice, and develop a media strategy to influence fathers to take a constructive role in family reproductive health.

Are Fathers Necessary?
Men have not always made the most positive contributions to their collective reputation, and this has prompted some to question whether they are even necessary. Are fathers useful only for purposes of procreation, or do they fulfill a much larger and overlooked role in the family?

The Lost Relationship: Fathers and Daughters 
Linda Nielsen, interviewed recently by Vision’s Gina Stepp, is a psychologist and professor of adolescent psychology and women’s studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Author of Embracing Your Father: How to Build the Relationship You Always Wanted with Your Dad (2004), Nielsen also teaches a “Fathers and Daughters” course, the only one of its kind in the United States for nearly 20 years.

Like Father, Like . . . Daughter?
Society is beginning to admit that a father is important to a boy’s well-being, but the question of how important fathers are to the well-being of their daughters has all but been ignored.

What's a Mother to Do? Of all the difficulties single mothers face, their most distressing one may involve coming to grips with the current understanding about fathers. However, single mothers can raise healthy, happy children. Vision interviews Kathy Stevens of the Gurian Institute to find out how single mothers can help their children find positive male role models.

RELATED LINK:

DIY Father
DIYFather.com was conceived by Wellington, New Zealand-based dads Scott Lancaster, Eric Mooij and Stefan Korn, who recognised the need for a dedicated website for fathers. Based on their own experiences as they struggled to find useful parenting-related information from a male perspective, DIY Father seeks to change the harmful stereotypes that diminish dads the world over.

Military Aid

Military Aid

Military aid can be controversial. Its stated aim is usually to help allies or poor countries fight terrorism, counter-insurgencies or to help suppress drug production.
Military aid may even be given to opposition groups to fight nations, which was commonplace during the Cold War where even dictatorships were tolerated or supported in order to achieve geopolitical aims.
The aid may be in the form of training, or even giving credits for foreign militaries to purchase weapons and equipment from the donor country.
It is argued that strengthening military relationships can strengthen relationships between nations and military aid may be a way to achieve that. But it seems some aid goes to oppressive regimes which may help with geopolitical aims but may not necessarily help people of the recipient nation.

Read “Military Aid” to learn more.

U.S. drop-out rates staggering

U.S. drop-out rates staggering

Education is a key influence on an individual’s social and economic future. Even so, according to a report prepared by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center (April 2008), in the United States, approximately 7,000 high school students drop out of school each day...about 1.2 million per year. What factors cause students to consider dropping out? What can educational systems do to reduce the vast numbers of lost students? Wise To Social Issues can provide you with more insight and a broad overview on Education.

Obesity as a Social Problem in the United States

Obesity as a Social Problem in the United States

Obesity rates in the United States have been rising over the past 35 years, resulting in a subsequent increase in nutrition-related chronic disease morbidity and mortality and significant burdens to families, communities, and health care systems. In working to formulate effective public health policy solutions that address the obesity epidemic, it is important to analyze how obesity has been defined and accepted as a social problem. This article applies Hilgartner and Bosk’s public arenas model to examine how obesity is defined in the public arena, how competition plays a role in "framing" the obesity issue, and how operatives influence the ways in which obesity is viewed and understood. Implications for nurses and policy makers are addressed in the context of using the public arenas model as a tool to analyze the social problem of obesity.

Key Words: obesity • policy • epidemic • public arena • capacity • competition

Access to health insurance

Access to health insurance

The United States does not have a national health care or socialized medicine system, although programs such as Medicare and Medicaid provide basic health insurance to elderly and poor residents. For most US residents, health insurance is provided as an employee benefit, leaving unemployed and part-time workers to pay for their own insurance. As of 2001, 41.2 million people in the United States (14.6% of the US population), including 8.5 million children, had no health insurance coverage. Efforts to provide universal health care in the 1960s and early 1990s foundered against widespread opposition, particularly by conservatives who objected to government control of medicine and business groups who did not want to experience a loss of profits with the increase of government bureaucracy in the health care and insurance industries. Despite a general agreement, enforced in law, that emergency care must be provided even to the indigent, there is no consensus in the United States that the availability of broader health care should be considered a right, nor that this service should be paid for by the state.

Crime and incarceration

Crime and incarceration

The United States prison population is the highest of any world country, both in absolute and relative numbers. A substantial percentage of people behind bars are drug offenders, which is due to the so-called "war on drugs", a very rigid and controversial policy against selling and using recreational drugs. Incarceration of convicted criminals for long sentences was particularly popular politically in the 1990s, leading to the passage in many states of strict minimum sentencing guidelines and three strikes laws, which lead to incarceration for life after three felonies have been committed, including a number of drug crimes.

Poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth

Poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, US foreign policy was largely focused on fighting communism. Some, but not all, socialist efforts to redistribute wealth from the upper and middle classes towards the lower classes were often met with opposition, perhaps made greater due to the external threat of communism and its connection with socialism. Efforts to break up large conglomerates which started near the turn of the century became less frequent after the Great Depression and in the 1980s and 1990s, there were numerous mergers which would not have been possible in the past.

Some political activists blame these mergers for perceived increases in income and wealth inequality during this time, although econometricians blame the increase on a wider variety of causes, including increasing returns on education, rises in the stock market, the winner-take-all phenomenon, changes in the US tax code, and changes in the composition of households used to compute income and wealth statistics.

Unequal funding of educational system

Unequal funding of educational system

The US educational system is compulsory for the first 12 years of education (roughly ending when students are 18 years old); however, it is funded and controlled primarily by state and local governments. Control of education is primarily in control of the states with smaller portions of control going to local communities. Especially since the creation of the Education Department, the federal government has had an ever-increasing amount of control of education in the United States. The funding and condition of the school system in each municipality is largely determined by local government. In affluent communities, especially with large numbers of childbearing families, the educational system tends to be more heavily funded and tends to be more effective. Communities that are less affluent or have fewer childbearing families generally have less funded educational systems.

Alleged social problems of the United States

Alleged social problems of the United States

The United States has created one of the most impressive economies without choosing to create the same state structures for the promotion of social justice as Western Europe. There are many social and political reasons for this including: values of self-sufficiency, a conservative electorate, effects of the spoils system, and Federalism. Socioeconomic issues perceived by social justice advocates include: an "unequal" educational system, poverty, high crime and incarceration rates, and lack of access to health care. Some people believe that the past history of racism and racial segregation is also behind any opposition to social justice programs.