Month: October 2018

The South African Storm

 

The narrative essay The South African Storm by Allison Howard has an identical theme to Gandalf’s quote from the movie The Hobbit . In both pieces the main theme is changing the world doesnt require one person and one action, it requires the everyday pursuit of everyday people attempting to better the world. Gandalf explains that fighting evil is not acheived by great, unreachable power but by “small acts of love and kindness (Gandalf)”. Allison agrees with this because of the regret she feels about getting in the white mans’ car; She wants to perform the small actions to push back little by little the instututionalized racism left over by the apartheid for example walking with the rest of the black people in the rain to show her support.

An example of a way we can push back against certain types of social stratification, like oppression of minorities, is to bring about anonymity on courts. When individuals are being sentenced it should not matter what they look like but what they did and have done. The sentencings should be blind to avoid the unfair profiling and ethnic discrimination of  minority groups. This is equally important to make sure that the majority’s are exonerated for their innocence instead of their race.

The Key to Success

Why Most People Will Never be Succesful

This article caught my eye and piqued my interest because the author indicates that he had the secrets to why people aren’t successful. I would like to be successful so I wanted to learn what not to do. I liked the authors writing style because he didn’t seem to be talking from above you. It was a friendly tone as if he was telling you because he cared about you. I connected this article to literary terminology of escape and interpretive fiction. The author is saying that we will need to spend less of our time on mediocre tasks; This is the same as reading solely escape fiction. We will never be able to grow and learn if that is all we read and learn. The article portrayed to me that people are inherently inventive driven. People like to follow insentives even if they are not beneficial to them in the future. The article is working to elaborate on the habits and mindset we must develop. These habits and mindsets will always have to built and improved to marketing us more productive and accomplishing more.

The Solution to Space Trash

NASA Funds Ultra-Thin Spacecraft for Clearing Space Junk

This topic seemed really interesting to me because it isn’t something that people think about a lot. It is never thought about all the space trash that is sitting in orbit of our planet that we have no good way to collect. I liked the authors style of writing because it seemed to me like we were having an informed conversation. It didn’t seem like he was throwing random facts at me but he was educating me and and enlightening me. He writes in a laid back tone but it doesn’t sound unprofessional. This article revealed to me that humans are very ambitious creatures. We get so excited about future endeavours that we have and we forget that there are sometimes consequences to our actions that we never anticipated. We can oftentimes forget that we have to clean up after ourselves and the problems do not disappear, even in space where it can seem minuscule important but eventually can make a lasting impact.