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Showing posts from September, 2017

Who Needs a Government Anyway?

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Government is something that people are always talking about, be it the news anchors on TV or Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show or, in this case, Mr. Henry David Thoreau in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience . His long and dense piece can be summarized in two sentences: A) “That government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau 1) and B) Always disregard authority and, whenever the opportunity presents itself, be a rebel.   In Thoreau’s case, what he did made sense. He refused to pay taxes because he knew that his money was being used to fight a war that he disagreed with, and consequently he went to jail for it until someone payed his taxes for him. He rebelled because he disagreed with something the government was doing. But then he wrote a 16-page essay about how the entire government system sucks and is completely unnecessary. Which I completely disagree with. Having a government is imperative. How else will a country and its citizens remain in order, and be s...

Details, Details, Details...

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During the week, we talked a lot about memorials, and how they were effective in representing the lost. Throughout this discussion, what fascinated me was how detailed memorials are, and how every aspect of them, from location to materials used, is purposefully chosen. For instance, In Postcards from the Trenches , even the decision to have live soldiers act like statues, instead of having actual statues, was symbolic because “the guards must mimic the stony inaccessibility of the dead but not permanently...they must fluctuate, ceremonially, between life and death” (Booth 34). (I think this was the point where the intricacy and details of memorials really hit me.) To put it in one sentence: memorials are DEEP.  This really made me think - are our lives like that too? Isn't everything like that too? Is every detail of our lives, every occurrence, for a reason, to complete the complicated puzzle of life? Whenever something bad happens in our life, we are frustrated and wonde...