John Muller Blog 9

The community is a place where we can share our ideas with a group that we trust. Throughout our “Teaching My Community” projects we were able to share our own ideas to the community we have created in class. It was a great experience and amazing to see how much the projects varied but also how well they all tied and I believe this was a result of our community trusting one another and also encouraging creativity. Within such a close knit community we are bound to discover and share certain private information about one another’s lives. The question of what information should be divulged to the community as opposed to what can stay private is where the line starts to blur. In the United States we have sex offender registries, credit card ratings, and various other statistics assigned to us that can be seen by the community. These statistics can be found by a simple background check and most people would agree we owe it to the community to divulge this information, but where do we draw the line on what is private and what is public.

So if we are able to determine a person’s education, credit history, and criminal history what areas are private? There are certain things that employers are forbidden from looking at such as religion, race, and sexual orientation. However, in a trusting community one would certainly reveal this information. In my own personal life the nation provides me with guidelines and regulations on how to live my life. The nation provides me with laws telling me what I can and cannot do and provides me opportunities with respect to education and work. I think the goal of any nation in the life of an individual is to improve the society as a whole and get each and every individual to a higher quality of life than they could have achieved on their own.