Democracy in America

Morals and the argument and just and unjust are very similar. People that are just are said to have good morals. Those who are unjust are said to have bad morals. Alexis de Tocqueville says that the majority, ‘possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as much as upon the actions,” (59). His opinion is that the majority has more power than just a single ruler. I agree with him on that point because one main leader can speak to the mass, but a a majority can move a mass of people into doing something. Kofin Annan’s Nobel Peace Prize Lecture starts off with a small example, and then broadens to his general ideas. This is a great skeleton for a speech or essay for that matter. He grabs your attention with a specific story, and then fills in with facts and general info, before closing by coming back to that same story he began the whole speech with.

Civil Disobedience and ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ Readings

The Civil Disobedience essay was so thick and really hard for me to read.  The point brought up in paragraph 8, about When a honest man can rebel, is interesting. It says that when the country is ‘unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army’, that’s when you can break laws and revolt. In the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Reading, Martin Luther King speaks so kindly, yet so assertively. Take the couple of lines at the top of page 216. “It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative”. He has a way with words that lets him assert his point without trying to sound too overpowering. I believe, based particularly on the Martin Luther King reading, that it is time to break a law when the law begins to  damage people. You cannot have laws that do damage (mental or physical) to a certain group of people, because thats not just. Like Martin Luther King says, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (pg 218).

Justice

The definition of justice, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the following: The quality of being (morally) just or righteous. Now, when looking at the plethora of super heroes at the exhibit, I could see that all the super heroes were depicted as being the main figure of the picture and they were the one that everyone looked up to. All the super heroes also had perfect bodies: It didn’t matter if it was a man super hero or woman super hero, they both had the big muscles and skin-tight outfits. When I see this in comics, I think that the writers must think its right for the superheroes to have perfect bodies. That must be the just thing to do. Also, the villains always had a scowl on their face, and were particularly ugly as well. The villain seemed to be shadier, and not as flamboyant as the super hero. Justice, in this case, relates to super heroes since they all do the right thing, in fighting crime. They also serve justice since some of them try to blend in with the average person.

2 Questions on Walton and Beauvoir

1) I can see a great amount of similarities between Simon de Beauvoir’s essay and the recent article by Lisa Belkin called, ‘The Way We Live Now’. I brought up the point in my last blog that I don’t agree with Belkin’s point that woman are succeeding only because men are failing. Beauvoir has a very similar statement, ‘ They (women) have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received’. Both writers have similar styles in that they don’t give many props to their own gender.

2)Box 3: “If a woman has a special gift–which doesn’t happen often–I do not think it right to reuse her the chance and means of studying…[but] such a case must always be regarded just as an exception”(Richter)

Reworded: If the rare situation of a woman having a special gift comes up, don’t deny her means to achieve. Just consider it a one-time thing, not a regular achievement.

The Xanith/ Why Do I Wear Hajib?

After reading ‘The Xanith’, I still wasn’t clear what the difference between a homosexual and a xanith was in their society? Also, not even on the topic of the xanith themselves, but just seeing all the basic rules in their society for women, like not being able to leave the house at night without the husband’s consent or having to wear a burqa, made me realize how radically different the American society is from the muslim world. I do believe some of their rules are too harsh on women and that women should have the right to be equal to men, but I don’t think our society would be able to function with those types of rules. Seeing how much more modern America is, I don’t believe we’d be able to keep up our modernization if we had to live with rules like that. Reading ‘Why Do I Wear Hajib’, i saw a sort of, flip, in the theory that wearing a hijab brought a women down. I’d think that some women would hate wearing that, but Sultana writes that it, ‘is actually one of the most fundamental aspects of female empowerment’. Also reading the handout called ‘The Way We Live Now’, it brought up a lot of valid points about how women have been getting their jobs. It’s sort of a harsh article, and makes seem like women haven’t really done any of the hard work, and it’s just because men are wilting, that women are growing. I don’t agree with that, but it’s a well-written article.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi/ Chp 5/Oryx and Crake

Well the reading, ‘Oryx and Crake’, by Margaret Atwood, was very strange. The beginning was sort of scrambled, then I started to understand what was going on in the middle, and by the end, I was confused again. I felt uncomfortable reading about what these kids did. I don’t find much to pull from this story. Chapter 5 of ‘The Shape of Reason’ brings up some good points about your audience as a writer. There have been situations when I’ve been about to start a paper, and I have to think about what my audience is going to be, and base my writing on that. For example, if you wrote an essay on how much you loved the San Francisco Giants and sent it to the Los Angeles Times, you’d get no readers. Or you’d get a lot of hate-mail. Certain topics fit with only certain types of audiences. Right from the beginning of the reading “Beijing Forum on Women”, the author is so kind, humble, and thankful. Is this because she’s so blessed to be able to write this letter? Or is from her upbringings? She brings up a point I’ve never really thought of. ‘No war was ever started by women’. Is this because it is within every male to have that type of toughness? Or is it because females choose not to have this aggression? After reading through page 251 of the reading, I wonder if there are more men than women that feel they don’t get the mutual respect they deserve from the other sex? We always talk about how women aren’t given as many opportunities as men, but sometimes that translates to women looking down at men because they feel they need to in order to get ‘ahead’ of them.

First Group of Readings….

The first assigned reading was from the book, ‘Shape of Reason’, and the first chapter was titled, ‘Writing and the College Community’. One of the first lines that caught my attention was, ‘Although we share some characteristics with the other members of each community we belong to, as individuals we are also unlike those members in other ways.’ Now, I believe that if everyone in a certain community were totally alike, it wouldn’t create a community. Part of a community is the uniqueness that each person brings, along with the items they have in common. There’d be something missing if every person was the same race, the same age, had the same job, and did the same thing everyday. When they continue to mention language, are they referring to a certain language, or is being used in a more figurative way? The author says that Diversity of opinion in a community (particularly the college community) should be valued, and I totally agree. I have a liberal political view, but though I most always disagree with a conservative’s opinions on politics, being able to listen to their view just strengthens my feelings towards being a democratic liberal. From this reading, I must ask. How do you know if your opinion is the best one? When do you realize if you’re opinion makes most sense?

Onto the second reading. George Orwell’s, “Shooting an Elephant”. I really liked this little story. Just how the story starts grabs your attention, and makes you read the rest. “I was hated by large numbers of people,”. The over-arching lesson in this story to me was that even if you don’t want to, you must prove to others your position in life. This guy was an officer for the British Empire, and though he didn’t want to shoot the crazy elephant, he had to because if he didn’t, all the villagers would look at him differently. So would the higher ranked officials of the British Empire. With a certain title, you carry certain responsibilities. You can tell he doesn’t feel good about shooting the elephant. He keeps re–assuring himself he did the right thing. That what he did was what he had to do, because he was an officer, and he had already committed to doing it when he got the gun. His mind was fighting itself in this one.

Third reading: Thomas Hardy’s, “The Man He Killed”. I didn’t really get the whole concept of this little poem. I mean, there are two soldiers, and they have to shoot at each other because they are in war. Otherwise, they’d probably be friends, because they are pretty much the same person outside of war. But since they are in war, they must shoot. I’m wondering when this was written and where these men were from? It must’ve been a time of struggle wherever it was, because it says they were out of work and had no choice on whether to join the army or not.

Fourth reading: Robert Brannon’s, “Why Men Become Men, and Other Theories,”. So, according to this reading, if I didn’t start playing with toy trucks, I’d be considered homosexual?  Also, I really like paragraphs 16-19. I believe that a true man should cry. You hear a lot of people say that nowadays. If a man can’t display emotion, that, to me, shows that they are weak. I mean, I believe in having ‘thick skin’, but that doesn’t just have to apply to men. If something tragic happens to you, as a man, and you don’t show any emotion? That shows that you are in denial of that particular situation. In life, you need to accept those things and move forward. Letting your emotions out is healthier, and let’s you be able to move ahead in life. Not being able to display emotion shows that a man is thin, and one dimensional to me. It’s almost like there’s no soul in you, that you’re just a robot, if you can’t display all your emotions.

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