Revolution

Constance and I were talking about Wikileaks earlier. I was really pent up about it, talking about how we need to get really animated and have a freakin' revolution because of all the horrible things that are happening that we're not doing anything about. For a moment I was kind of mad at her because she was sort of shrugging the whole thing off. This is what she said (which is up on Facebook): 

‎"There's a difference between being calm and not doing anything. In some cases it's better to be calm when trying to convince someone of your opinion, because it's easier to make rational points. People can have calm revolutions. That's sort of the point of nonviolence; you can be passionate without being...overly forceful. Being animated is important, but it's better to be inwardly animated in some situations."

I couldn't agree with this more.  If everyone is calm and collected, they can think things through before making any life-changing actions. And I'm pretty sure there's going to be some kind of revolution- ask any astrologist. Every certain period of years, the stars and planets line up in certain ways that make things happen. It starts with some kind of corrupted government, or more, and ends with revolution and a hunger for new ways of thinking. It's sort of like evolution. Right now the stars are making their patterns and charging up the air and making so many people sit on the edges of their seats. I feel, personally, that some kind of revolution is right around the corner.

I just hope that society will be able to think rationally when the time comes.

Child Celebrities- Rebuttal

    I'm going up against Elton, and his blog post about celebrity role models.

    First of all, this blog post is very badly worded. It was kind of hard to read, and was kind of confusing at a lot of parts. Because of this, it wasn't very convincing. The level of persuasiveness went down because of this, which does not make for a good argument.

    Anyways, I do not agree with Elton. His thesis is:

Child actors should be Role Models because since they are well known and just about everywhere, they could be a huge influence over the children over the world.

    Celebrities should not be the role models for children (or, at least, they shouldn't be expected to). Teachers and parents, as well as other family members, should be the only role models for a child's life. Most child actors, in the end, grow up to do drugs and lead lives of depression. This is not what we should consider a 'role model'. Elton goes onto say that child actors could tell the children the difference between right and wrong because the children would listen to them. I disagree with this because it's the parents should be teaching their kids the differences between right and wrong. People might say, "Oh, but children never listen to their parents!"
    If children are raised in an open environment in which their parents are comfortable answering their constant questions and, basically, being the child's main source of information (instead of the television or the computer), the child will automatically develop the idea that parents know what's best. It's basic logic.

Quickwrite- The Color Purple

Celie is obviously religious. Then again, taking in the way the book is written and the way the people act, I think everyone was religious back then. You can get the general feeling of the time period from the quote, "Mr. _____ marry me to take care of his children. I marry him cuz my daddy made me. I don't love Mr. _____ and he don't love me," (Page 63). Forced marriage is a very old tradition that almost completely ended in the early nineteen hundreds (save for a few shot gun weddings). Thus, she probably didn't have any other choice but to be at least somewhat religious.

However, the only time she talks about religion or God is A) when she talks about being pregnant at church and B) when she actually says "Dear God". I don't think they had journals back then (or, at least, they weren't widely used), so this might just be her way of saying "Dear Diary". At the very beginning of the book it says, "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." I think this is her father speaking to her. He told her to only talk to God about these things, and so she began writing letter to God, informing him of the horrors of her life.

So, in summary of my opinion of the religious aspect of The Color Purple, is that God isn't much more than someone to talk to. In fact, (don't read this next bit if you aren't at least two third through with the book), later on she even rejects God and begins writing letters to her sister, Nettie, instead. Suddenly, there's someone else to spill her heart to and she doesn't have to rely on a faith that she probably wasn't even completely certain of the entire time, anyway. This proves that, while she was writing to God, she wasn't even fully sure that he existed- she just desperately needed a place to record her thoughts and the passing moments of the history of her life.

Teens voting? No way.

(By the way, I know I've already made a post about this before, but whatever, I'll make another one!)

The debate topic I chose was for whether or not teenagers should be able to vote in political elections, as in for president or governor or whether or not a specific bill should be passed. Which side am I on?

No. I definitely think that teenagers should NOT be allowed to vote. Our brains just aren't functioning right yet. I got a lot of my info on the brains of teenagers from this website.

As adults, brains are completely wired up. All these little strings of information, all the different parts that work out what to do, all the complexity. Most of the building of this natural computer is done during the teenage years. During this time, these little wires and loose ends, called synapses, are incredibly chaotic. Not only that, all development starts in the back of the brain- the part that controls reason and common sense is in the front. Which means that, until we're adults, our brains won't have developed enough.

It doesn't stop there. As adults, when we make mistakes, the front part of the brain instantly alerts us and informs us to fix it. So we fix it. As teenagers, since that part of our brain hasn't fully developed yet, we can make severe mistakes in our decision-making and never notice. This is what leads teens to doing drugs, drinking alcohol, throwing massive parties, running away from home, having sex, etc, etc. As adults, we'd never choose to do these kinds of things because our brains would be firing off signals saying, "Hey, wait! That's not right!" This part of our brain doesn't develop until the mid-twenties.

So what does this mean? It means that teenagers are horrible at making decisions and our brains don't alert us to tell us that decision was wrong. So what if a teen made the wrong decision in voting? Teenagers generally just go with whatever their parents say- in their homes they're surrounded by people constantly talking about one certain way of doing things. The TV is probably constantly tuned to the news channel that follows that certain political party the most. It isn't until a person is an adult that they begin thinking outside of their parent's opinions (in most cases, at least). As teens we think of the one side of things at that's that. As adults we think of everything and how it might involve us or the world and what each party is saying, etc...

I do not think that teens should be allowed to vote.

Literature Circles... good or bad?

I happened upon a quote from Mercedes's blog that I, truly, couldn't agree with more...

"In all honesty, I find the lit circle discussions irritating because we haven’t really worked out a system to actually discuss the topic. It’s really more of a Lit Circle Argument than anything else. More often than not, your opinion on the matter at hand is brutally rebutted and you are told point-blank that you are wrong."

I find this to be pretty accurate. It's incredibly stressful to sit in a room where everyone seems to be shouting at once. One person says one thing, another person says something in rebuttal, and they say it louder so as to be heard, everyone else suddenly joins in because they've got an opinion that needs to be heard, too...

It's all just very disastrous. People still end up chattering away. People with good opinions don't get heard. Soon, not even the teacher, Mr. Sutherland, can keep them contained. I seems like the lit circles are only good for arguing and creating rifts between students, not actually talking about the book.

And then there's the 'debates'. Oh, how terrible those are. It's even worse then- every voice speaking, every thought becoming part of the conversation. Small little arguments break off from the main one. Sometimes between people at opposite sides of the room.

It's so overwhelming. It's like people are arguing just for the sake of an argument. Fighting. It's all about who's tougher, who's got the most information and evidence, and who's got the balls to just keep going and going and going...

Class debates and lit circles aren't my favorite of things...

Collegiate Crap

    We were reading short debates from seven people on the topic, "Which is better, elite colleges or non-elite colleges?"
    I'd have to say that, personally, I don't know. I read the debates, but none of them seemed to strike me as being "The One Debate to rule them all", y'know? I mean, for a little while there I thought that Martha O'Connell had a pretty good speech. I was even convinced that non-elite colleges were better. Really, I still am. But there are a lot of up-sides to the whole elite thang. There's title and respect and general admiration and fact that you'd be more likely to get hired...
    However (yes, I finally got around to my complaints!), none of their essays were convincing enough. Most of the time they were just opinionated pieces full of possibly made up statistics since they don't actually give sources... It all just seems so unnecessary and... well, just... not very well done. I mean, they're adults, but I could still have done a better job than them, and I'm in the ninth grade!
    Also, I have something to say about the way they were written. If the average person had been reading these, whom had not had them assigned, they wouldn't have lasted long. The average person would have given up at hello. For almost all of the essays I read, I was (sorry, but) bored out of my mind. The average John Doe wouldn't read the entire thing. So what's the point of writing an essay and taking part in a debate where you're trying to get people to join your 'side' when you can't even write something that people will read?
    It just doesn't make sense to me. The whole thing seemed very... well, to me the entire debate seemed sort of immature. The way some of the people phrased things, y'know? And then, because of the fact that it all seems so unnecessary and forced, I just couldn't pick a side. I couldn't find any kind of opinion, except for that I don't think they were well written, structured, or had enough good evidence.

What monstrosity is this?

Hiroshima. Nagasaki. We're learning about these places and their disastrous histories in (surprisingly) Writing class, as the unit we're studying is peace and how to achieve it and it was used as an example of using violence to achieve peace, since the bombings ended World War Two.

But are we going to learn about the Bataan Death March? How many people even know what that is?

I've known about Hiroshima and Nagasaki for years. I'm not sure if I heard about it through my parents or on the History channel, but I do remember, while watching a "Fairly Odd Parents" movie, the part where the character Timmy splits an atom and it explodes, and thinking to myself, "Like in Japan!"

But never did I know about the Bataan Death March until today. The Japanese marched US soldiers for miles and miles and miles. They were tortured. Starved. When a man would die the others would have to dig a grave for him (with their hands?). When a sick man would drop of exhaustion, they would dig him a grave as well and bury him alive.

Apparently my brother-in-law's grandfather, whom he calls Papa, and who is around ninety eight years old, is the last survivor of this tragedy. He wrote a book about it, but it was never published. My brother-in-law told me he couldn't even finish reading it because it was so horrific.

What kind of civilization are we, what kind of people, where these kinds of things can happen and we can just move on with our lives? After all of the multitudes of wars that have taken place on the face of our earth, all the genocide, how can we just go about our days with our computers and TVs and gaming systems?

It's because we can't handle this sort of thing. I usually am, I'm usually able to just move on and shrug it off and think, "That's horrible, but I shouldn't linger on the past." But this, this... is inexcusable. Historians and others are still, to this day, trying to find reasons that will justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with reasons like "Oh, well, the Japanese were being bad too so they needed to be punished" and "They would have been firebombed anyways, so it really doesn't matter." No. There is absolutely no justification for this, or the Bataan Death March.

It's ****ed up, and what's worse is that people can just live with themselves after learning what their own countries have done.