Am I a Transcendentalist?

Transcendentalists are generally open-minded folk who are quite idealistic. They dream of a bright future where everybody is a good person with a conscience. Though this would be a lovely world to live in, I doubt it will happen any time soon.
I agree that everybody should trust themselves and rely on themselves more than anybody else. It is good to be independent. I agree that people should be educated and peaceful with others. I agree that people should be patriotic to their countries, to a certain extent. (Citizens shouldn't support unjust countries.)
I disagree with the religious stuff, mainly. From my understanding, transcendentalism has a lot to do with religion, which is chill, but not my kind of chill. I am also not a fan of all the men in transcendentalism who care more about man's progression than woman's. A true transcendentalist should promote equality among everybody.
I am a very skeptical person, so I would not call myself a transcendentalist. My idealistic world would be a world of peace and equality and justice, which does include some key ideas of transcendentalism. My problem is that I do not believe that everybody has good in them. Obviously there are corrupt people out there who are unjust and all-around bad guys. I would like everybody to be great human beings, but I simply do not believe it.

The Great Gatsby (2013) - Music

Before watching the film, my father had warned me about the music. (He thinks he is a music expert because he listens to "good music" instead of today's popular music.) I was expecting the worst. My father was only partially correct. Some of the songs worked, others did not.
The one song that I specifically remember my father warning me about is the Will.i.am song titled "Bang Bang." I'd heard the song before in the commercials for the movie when it first came out, and I was not impressed. The song is just such an ugly one, it did not go well with The Great Gatsby film. The beat is somewhat catchy, but the repetition of the word "bang" is mainly obnoxious and slightly gross to listen to. The song is ultimately quite cringe-inducing.
As for the rest of the music, I thought the movie a fairly good job with making it easier for today's audiences to realize how the parties were, whether I actually enjoyed the music or not. If the movie chose to use music that was popular then, today's audience would think that it was kind of lame. I imagine that the two kinds of music would display very different atmospheres for Gatsby's parties.
My favorite part involving music was the Lana Del Rey song "Young and Beautiful." At one point, there was a character at one of Gatsby's parties performing the song in a "old-timey" way, at least compared to the modern-sounding version. The lyrics were the same, but the instrumental part was different. I like the original version of the song, but the movie did a good job of transforming it into a song that sounded like it fit with the time period.
This doesn't have much to do about music, but it was really weird to see Tobey Maguire, AKA Spiderman, as Nick. He worked better as Peter Parker.

Bowling for Columbine

In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore asked why it was only Americans who continuously made such poor decisions regarding firearms and gun control. Americans have the "right to bear arms," according to the Bill of Rights. The main reason people purchase and keep guns is for "protection." Though, what are we protecting ourselves from? Other people with guns?
I do not believe that a gun is a good source of protection. If we never had the right to own guns in the first place, not unlike Japan, then maybe we wouldn't feel it necessary to possess a gun to protect ourselves. Japan's police officers are armed, though they believe that the gun is the absolute last resort. These police officers are trained in different martial arts for self defense instead of just gun training. They have nearly no need for a gun because almost nobody else in Japan owns a gun. Police officers would not have to open fire at somebody because that somebody likely does not have a gun themselves. Unarmed civilians are a lot less harmful to the public than civilians with guns. In the end, using guns for protection appears to be a vicious circle. We arm ourselves against the armed, hoping to fight fire with fire.
Now, it is said that guns don't kill people, but people do. For the most part, this is true. If people didn't have such easy access to guns, maybe they would just find an alternative way to murder. As for the case in Flint, Michigan, the child did not understand the severity of the gun that he used to kill an innocent girl. If that gun had not been present, that little girl could still be alive. The boy did not kill her. He had little to no understanding of the importance of life and death, there is no way he understood the permanence of what he did. The gun he had access to killed her. Guns being so easily accessible is not only a concern for the young. According to the article "A Land Without Guns," in 2008, 587 people in the United States were killed by a gun. On accident. That kind of sounds like a gun did kill somebody without a person doing it intentionally.
Unfortunately, it would be extremely difficult to change the United States' gun policy for the better. I hope one day we could live in an essentially gun-free environment, mainly because not much good has come from the violent ways of guns.