Outliers

This week in class, we read an excerpt from the book Outliers, which was about a group of Italian immigrants coming to America and all went to the same town of  Roseto,PA. There, they set up schools, churches, and a near-Utopian society. Then, someone from outside of the town realized that this particular town had absolutely no sign of heart disease, which was then raging through the US at a rapid pace. They also discovered that this town had no alcoholism, no divorces, no suicide etc. and that everyone was pretty close to perfect happiness. This story was very interesting because it related to sociological imagination, which is the idea that the outside world has a dramatic impact on how you live and that the world ultimately shapes how you are, whether you realize it or not  This related to the Outliers due to the idea that because of their extreme isolation from the outside world, their level of sociological imagination was different from other situations and they were not heavily impacted by the outside world  However, they were affected by the when and where of their existence and had they gone somewhere else at a different time, their interaction with the outside world would vary. I do believe that this sociological imagination theory is true in relation to my life. When I hear stories about the wars in the Middle East, for example, I try to imagine myself growing up there and I know that I would be a completely different person, would have different opinions and would have had many different experiences compared to those I've had growing up here. This is almost crazy to think about and shows how sometimes we truly do take things for granted, for our sociological imagination could have been completely different from what we have now and how we are living now.