ABORTION
This is definitely a hard topic. It’s a child’s life. I think about the bigger picture and how that child would be raised. I feel that every child deserves to be loved by their mother and father and taken care of as well as they can be. They should not be given to the grandparents or feel like they are a burden. It costs money. If the mother is willing to give the child away to a loving family, to give him/her a house and a home to live in, then it’s up to her, not up to the government. Everyone has their own opinions about it, so if the mom is pro-life then obviously she’s going to give the child the best life that she wants to. I think that I am pro-choice. Everyone should be able to dictate their own lives and what happens with their own body. I know that some people wouldn’t agree with that.
LGBTQ+ RIGHTS
Everyone is allowed to have their own rights. Who is someone else to tell you that you can’t do something? That’s really what it comes down to. It’s honestly fear. They are scared of something different, of what other people might do, or standards that might be broken, or change. I don’t have a problem with it and I don’t think that anybody else should have a problem with it.
My high school friends had a big impact on me with regard to that. I grew up in the church and there were no gay rights and no gay marriage. One of the questions to get your temple recommend was, “Do you support gay marriage?” If you said “yes” to that, you couldn’t get your recommend. That was a mindset that I grew up in, but once I got to high school some of my friends were bisexual. They’re democrats and support gay pride and they showed me a different light, which was that everyone is human.
I think that people tend to dehumanize these subjects. They are taking the individual’s struggles out of it.
RACIAL MOVEMENTS
I was fascinated with the movements that came before Black Lives Matter. This is cliché, but I was so moved, always, by Rosa Parks. She changed history so fast by not doing one thing. It was just her. All of these people stood behind her and said, “We’re going to boycott the buses”. It took down the government.
My grandpa is very uncomfortable with people of color. I’ve discussed it with my family before and it’s just a fact. He grew up that way. They were brought up to think that way. In the generations that are on this earth, it’s still embedded in them, in their belief systems. I think that has an impact on where it is today. That’s the reason why we still have so many people who are so racist. Black Lives Matter is a really good movement because it shows people like me, who grew up thinking that it’s over and is something that you learned in history, that it’s really still here today in this world that we live in.
IMMIGRATION
My mom came here from Japan. She hardly spoke English and was 20. If I was in Mexico around drug deals, the mafia, and was scared for my life, of course I would rather come here to America where it’s obviously not as bad. I wouldn’t want to raise my children in that environment. I would want to give them a shot at a good life.
With a lot of the patients that I’ve encountered, I always ask them what they do in their work and a lot of them are tradespeople. We’ve all seen it. They are always so incredibly hard working. The ones that I know work hard, make their money, and just try and enjoy their life here. I don’t have a problem with it.
