Last Monthly Blog sniff.. sniff...

As the year comes to an end I find it fitting that my final monthly blog will be discussing the importance of education. Education as a whole takes many different forms whether in the forms of literature and math or in the form of how society works through first hand experience. In The Power of One, Peekay prided himself in the education that her received from Doc and he used it through the rest of his life. In The Invisible Man, The Narrator gained a first hand education of how society thinks and he used his speeches to not call the people to action but to educate them and make them think. The Narrator understood the importance of education and so used it in what he considered his life's purpose. Even in The Fountainhead where Howard Roark rejected the formal education of a college, he still understood that he needed an education to be an architect so he took almost every job involved in building a building and educated himself through doing. The importance of education is still relevant today because our society goes to depraved areas in Africa and South America to build schools because one thing our society can agree on is the importance of an education.
In my opinion education is the backbone of our society, without humanity as a whole would have nothing to keep it together. That's why humans have a natural urge to learn, because we need to or we will fall apart. We as humans learn new things everyday, whether that be that pressing the roof of your mouth relieves a brain freeze or that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, I believe that everything we learn helps us in someway. Nelson Mandela once said "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world" and I believe him, because everything that I learned in high school, from the books I read to the formulas I learned, had made me a person for all the better.

Blog #7

What is it about evil that makes it so appealing in the movies, like Anakin going to the dark side?  Why is it that a character who was good turns evil? Can a person resist the call for evil, even for something world-changing? These questions even pose themselves in literature as in The Picture of Dorian Grey, Dorian chose to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth, and he spends his youth degrading himself to murder, blackmail, and drugs. In Faustus, Dr. Faust sells his soul for knowledge, knowledge he'd use to conquer the world. Faust, a respectable man, sells his soul to Lucifer, the embodiment of evil, it isn't more of a role reversal than that. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll gives up his humanity because he enjoyed the reckless murderous beast of a form that was Mr. Hyde. This is relevant today because everyday people are succumbing to evil, there are murderers, rapists, and slave traffickers who all started as an innocent people, even Hitler was considered an innocent being at some point.

  In my opinion people aren't born evil, it's the events and choices that take place in their lives which turn them into evil beings. It's also in my opinion that people who were once evil can change. For example, Frank Abagnale Jr. was a famous check-forger and impostor who after a prison sentence turned his life around and became a consultant for the FBI and helped them catch forgers much like himself. To me evil is a path, anyone can take it, but the longer you stay on it the harder it is to get off, and that's why characters like Dorian Grey, Faust, and Jekyll didn't have a happy ending.

blog 6

When things are down or looking bad humans always turns to hope, but what can hope do? People see hope in two ways, the positive way being that hope is good and it acts as comfort to a person in need. The other is that hope is for the delusional and hope is just a buffer, preventing the taking of action, that stalls person from the inevitable. In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, hope is shown through many of the characters, from Laila's hope that Rasheed would leave her alone or her hope that she could get her daughter back from the orphanage. Both were the good types of hope that Laila truly believed would come true. The delusional type of hope was shown through Nana, Mariam's mother, Nana hoped that Mariam would stay away from her father but she knew it would never happen and so her hopes were just a placebo for the truth. Hope is still relevant today because hope is felt by everyone, whether it's a low-level business employee hoping for a promotion or the thousands of Syrian's hoping for food and shelter in the aftermath of their civil war, hope is everywhere.

In my life I can't even put the semblance of a number to the number of times that I have hoped for something. From a child to now I've always hoped for something for Christmas, and I'm I'll hope for something till I die. In my opinion hope is always a good thing. To me hope is like never giving up on something condensed into one feeling. To me hope is not delusional but a driving factor that gets things done. Basically, hope is what hard workers are made of and it's the hard workers of the world that get things done.

Blog 5

Free will is subject quite unique to humans, unlike our animal counterparts who having be doing what ever they want since their beginning, humans have always been acting under the will of society or the will of God, or anyone else's than their own. Recently, though humanity has begun to embrace the choice of free will and started doing things for themselves, such as the Russian people's uprising in 1917, who broke out from under the will of the domineering bourgeoisie. Free will is also a subject widely used in literature.In literature such as The Awakening, free will is shown through Edna as she leaves the life she was unhappy with and went to one she was contempt with, ignoring society's judgement throughout. Another example is the Narrator in The Invisible Man who fights society's expectations of him and goes underground to truly discover himself. Free will is also a concept still relevant today as women is Muslim cultures are not acting upon their own free will, they wear body covering dresses called burquas, some women hate these burquas but do to their religion they have to wear them. This is just one example out of many in today's world of free will being oppressed.

In my personal opinion free will is great, within reason of course. I mean if a person wants be president or wants to protest the president,it doesn't matter, all power to them, but if a person wants to go around killing people in the name of their cult like Charles Manson then that's where I'll have to draw the line. I believe that free will is a great concept but when we take too much advantage of free will that's how we end up with Charles Manson's, Bernie Madoff's, and John Dillinger's. So my overall opinion when it comes to free will would be it's great thing, but we all know what they say about too much of a good thing.

BLog 4

       The earth is a big ball of different cultures, and the challenge of relating to one another's culture is what causes conflict in our world. This problem is evident through out literature and is mainly responsible for the conflicts within. In The Power of One, Peekay was bullied by Judge and the other Nazi youth just because he was British. Judge and the others did not know Peekay but they were unable to relate to his culture and therefor abused him for it. Another example is from Things Fall Apart, as Okonkwo took his culture as the right culture compared to the Christian culture. As a result of his lack of Cultural Relativity he was unable to stop the spread of Christianity and eventually caused his own fall but if he respected the new culture things would have been peaceful. To fix this problem people need to enforce Cultural Relativity which is defined as "civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes," this means that our cultures reflect our society and our level of Cultural Relativity defines a society's civilization. A lack of Cultural Relativity is responsible for many wars on earth. Hitler felt the Jewish people's culture was inferior to his own and therefor he tried to force his "universal truth" onto them and he started WWII. Cultural Relativity is a challenge as the reading says because no one can completely agree with all cultures.
    I believe that Cultural Relativity is a necessary thing for all people to express in their lives, because a person can't have the same culture as everyone they meet, that's impossible. I also believe that all cultures should be acknowledged, now I'm not saying that we should accept them all but we should respect the fact that they are there and we can't change that. I agree with the benefits of Cultural Relativity as well. Cultural Relativity is a great thing because it brings a humbleness to one's culture and opens up a person's mind to other cultures. With Cultural Relativity I believe that we as a human race can better ourselves and come together as a species.      

Monthly Blog #3

   Procrastination is the action of not doing and it's a common theme among life and especially literature. In Hamlet, procrastination is a crucial factor to the plot, for if Hamlet didn't procrastinate and get his revenge on his uncle when he had the opportunity maybe the play wouldn't have ended with everyone he knew and loved dying along with himself. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon and Jack procrastinate in telling Gwendolen and Cecily that their names weren't actually Earnest and this leads to Gwendolen and Cecily to meet and find out that they think they are engaged to the same man. Not only is the concept of procrastination affect the consequences in literature but also in our modern day society, as every modern teenager, myself included, has procrastinated at least once in they're lives. Procrastination also isn't considered a bad thing in our modern society in fact there is The Procrastination Association which expresses the advantages of procrastination and even has a creed which followers live their lives by.
   In my opinion procrastination is necessary thing in everyone's life because everyone has a problem that they can't face without preparation, in my opinion procrastination is like a preparation period, and sometimes it's necessary. This doesn't mean that I believe that procrastination is all good, if you look at Hamlet and Algernon/Jack, you realize that too much procrastination can be a bad thing. My main point is that no one can go their whole lives prepared to handle a problem right on the spot, they need to put it off, whether out of fear of the results or to prepare themselves for the problem, but everyone procrastinates once in a while and it's a necessary part of human life.

10/31/13 Blog Entry #2

   One reoccurring theme in the past books we've read is what constitutes a hero, is it that muscle clad hero that saves the damsel or just a person who helps others? In Beowulf, our hero Beowulf  is a strong famed slayer of monsters who sacrificed his life to fight a dragon for honor. So is a hero someone who does things with honor? Beowulf's version of a hero is a strong man who fights with honor and this is what the basic form of a hero is. Or can a hero be The Narrator in The Invisible Man who speaks out against injustice in a peaceful way, using his words to help the people realize their problems. The Narrator uses his words not to defeat physical monsters but the "monsters" within our society and this also constitutes a hero. In our society we need heroes, they are the people who we aspire to be. Our heroes are people with powers that dress up in costumes and fight evil and this is what our society's children dress up as for Halloween, we in our society use heroes to guide us. Our heroes teach us the best of both worlds, to be strong like Beowulf but to be peaceful like The Narrator, “Believe me when I say I wish that violence wasn't necessary. But violence is the price we pay to accomplish a greater good, as heroes we choose to protect that good with our lives," this quote by Superman sums up our society's heroes perfectly. 
    In my opinion a hero is someone who does anything for others that helps them. To me a hero doesn't need to save the day but they just have to be someone that helps another get by with their day. Evil doesn't have to be a giant robot hell-bent on destroying the world, it can be a kid that lost his dog and the hero is the person who helps him look for it. Or a hero can be a the person who cheers someone up when they're down. Of course not all people who help others with small things are not a big of a hero as Beowulf or Abraham Lincoln but to me they are heroes all the same. Any person who helps people and does it selflessly is a hero to me.