Yesterday, I had an interesting political/social justice talk with my Mom. We were talking about the death penalty and whether we believe it is right or not, which brought us to the subject crime. For some reason, my Mom thinks that the U.S. is too lenient on crime and that all the other countries are very strict. I told her that’s not true. The U.S. has been upping the punishment for crimes for awhile now and the result hasn’t really decreased the amount of crimes committed. I said that crime is a social problem that we try to take care of in the wrong way. I said the system here punishes rather than tries to rehabilitates or even prevent crime. But she still thinks that we aren’t tough enough on crime. I told her to watch Bowling for Columbine and that might answer some of her questions as to why our society is the way it is. We also talked about immigrants. Now, don’t get me wrong my Mom is very liberal just sometime undereducated on issues. She tends to believe every myth out there until it is debunked for her. She really believes that people who immigrate to this country get handed the American Dream. She thinks s they get all these breaks and are able to just have the best life ever while our own people are starving. I told her that’s not true. Immigrants receive very little help when they come into this country. I don’t think she believed me. It’s strange for me to think that she thinks it is so easy for immigrants when in reality it’s not. I hate that she thinks things like that, but all I can do is slowly work on showing her the truth.