The Promise by C. Wright-Mills

...

become more aware of how society is functioning and be able to see relations from impersonal actions to intimate features of a human’s self. It is a way of understanding what is going on around, what is happening to yourself, and seeing where our histories intersect with our biographies. Now to the personal troubles into public issues, this is a strength in the sense that it shows the world that not just one person is having a specific trouble within their lives and, as a society, we need to try to fix the issue. Changes will occur to help solve the problem within a society after we all become more connected and understanding of the issue at hand.

For weaknesses, I feel personal troubles becoming public issues can also be a weakness as well as how our values today are more indifferent and uneasy. Personal troubles that become public issues is perceived as a weakness because not all issues that are public can be solved. People know of the issue but are unable to solve the problem because not everyone’s values and strengths are aligned in perfect unison. An example would be unemployment; you can create jobs for people but not everyone who is unemployed has the mind set to do the job or doesn’t value the work and pay that is offered because there is so much variety among the people of a society. Now for our uneasy and indifferent values, this is a weakness because it is unfair to say that people are unaware of cherished values and have no feeling of threat or do feel threat when different age groups actually have a set of cherished values. Older generations always shun the younger because their values aren’t in line with theirs. This concept is somehow supposed to make our values as a society uneasy and indifferent? Our society is not based on the values that used to be cherished, rather, based on what we, the generation of tomorrow, praise and value.

An application in my life that applies to the sociological imagination is obesity as a public issue and how our values have changed. More and more women and men are accepting that they are overweight and seeing the beauty in themselves; people around the world are in support for these men and women who are accepting who they truly are. These people shouldn’t be defined by their weight because the feeling of exclusion is terrible. I fully support this because I’ll admit, I’m not in perfect shape and I’m viewed as beautiful. On the other hand, though, obesity is a huge public issue. People continually become overweight because of how expensive healthy food is compared to the unhealthy food. I personally try so hard to eat healthy but it’s difficult when your pay check is on the lower end. If the price of healthy food went down, I feel more and more people would stop buying $5 of fast food, and start buying more healthy food like vegetables, fruits, and fresh meat.