Democracy Now assignment

Andrea Garcia SOC 122 Social Movements M,W 3:30-4:45pm

For this weeks assignment we had to look up headlines on “Democracy Now” and reflect on the news we captured. One of the headlines that caught my attention was “Ukraine: Deal Proposed to Hold Early Election After Deadly Violence”. Even though this issue is not affecting the U.S it is still affecting society as a whole. In this article it explained how Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych announcing concessions to his pro-European opponents to hold early elections, but its unclear if the opponent is going to accept the deal. At first from reading the beginning of the article it didn’t seem like it was such a huge news but the more I read it I saw that people were fighting about this issue and people were dying. This Thursday at least forty-seven people died, considered the most violent day Ukraine has had since its independence 22 years ago. I didn’t believe people should have died if the police were taking the right precautions and skills. Even the U. N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “I continue to strongly appeal to all involved to cease the violence and for the Ukrainian authorities to refrain from excessive use and force.”

  Another article I looked that surprised me was headlined, “Family: Teen Shot Dead by Police Was Holding Video Game Controller Not a Gun”. In Georgia, a seventeen-year-old ROTC student who was shot and killed by a police officer says police mistook a video game controller the teenager was holding for a gun. Police claimed he was holding the video game controller right at the police officer and mistook it for a weapon and shot fire at the teenager. This is very disturbing news to see how our officers are misleading games as weapons. The officers were at the mobile home of the student to serve a violation warrant for his father. There could have been many reason the officer took fire on the child, it could have been because of discrimination or prejudice and now the family has to deal with a lose of death for a young teenager because of those reasons or miscommunication.