“while confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your critcisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

Martin Luther King Jr. uses parallelism here by repeating the same two words three times throughout his first paragraph in his letter to the clergymen.

I did not find a specific commercial or ad that used language in a distorted way, because I wanted to mention music and just common conversations. In music today I believe there are a lot of distortions of language, do we ever truly know what an artist is trying to convey? We can guess and try to interpret but all we will have is just that a guess. Due to this an artist may be trying to send out a certain message but through their lyrics or made up words the listeners may hear something completely different than what was intended. I notice in music and in internet lingo the most distortion of language. There are a lot of misconceptions during a chat conversation with someone online or through text messaging. When words are used to say one thing and the person reading it comprehends it to mean something else that can cause a lot of confusion or even arguments. If you text someone “ya chris is sick!” do you mean he is sick like illness sick or is he sick like the slang word for cool? Without knowing tone of voice or facial expressions language can be misread or through music it can be misheard.

Without language we would not be able to communicate with eachother which would eliminate any sort of education. Even the use of your hands to send a message to someone is using language. If we eliminated all language then there would be nothing but existence and loneliness. Relationships would be impossible, learning would be impossible, progression would be impossible. Nothing would get better things would just stay the same always. As we mentioned in class, in the book of Genesis the first thing that God tells Adam to do is name the animals. This shows the importance of language even in the beginning of time.

Since we are blessed with the gift of education and language and the capability of so many things because of those things, we should try to not abuse it or distort it. This will only put us back at square one where we lack communication with eachother which is the same as not having language at all.

I think Achebe’s points about language make a lot of sense in the importance he gives it. Language may be one of the most important aspects of life.

I find that the time he lived in must have been so different than how it is now. We have gone from slavery, discrimination, inequality, and segregation to a world where all races have the same rights in education and life itself. African Americans are no longer slaves, and have the opportunity to vote and have their opinions counted for. If we had not crossed over such a threshold of allowing all races to vote then I cannot help but wonder if Obama would have still been elected president. If the world perceives him as “African American” and he was voted by the people to become president than that shows how far this country has come since Douglass’ time. When I was watching the celebrations of Obama’s election on TV I noticed that 90% of the people celebrating were of African American decent. I am glad that they had the right to vote for who they wanted as president. I still cannot help but wonder if they would have voted for him if they classified his race as Arab instead of African American. I also wonder if Douglass was here today would he have seen through the false racial classification or would he have been blind to what the media made everyone see.

I think if our country voted in someone of a race other than white than we have obviously moved forward in our walk towards equality whether that race is African American or anything else. We have different races in government, in teaching positions, in leadership positions and they are valued as well as anyone else. Douglass would be amazed at the impact he and so many other African Americans have had on changing our country for the better. Douglass did not really believe that we could change but he fought for his and others rights anyway. I am sure Obama did not know if he could pull off becoming the first “African American” president or not, but he tried anyway and he succeeded.

To obtain the things we want we must try hard and put all our effort and strength into it. Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and Obama have all proven this to be true.

America truly has changed for the better and equality is present in ways that Douglass could have only dreamed of. His dreams came true.

This is a presidential campaign commercial for McCain. In this commercial he uses historical references, children in the present, and his own speech to make his point that he is who the people should vote for to make our future better.

This commercial uses quotes from previous presidents and video clips that show the past history of America. It also uses clips of children playing in the present day to tie to the viewers emotions. And he uses his speech to talk about the future, tying in the past present and future. When I watched this commercial I got goosebumps. It reminded me of triumph, success, freedom, misfortune, pride, courage, faith, and love for our country. We have fought for our rights and fought for our successes. McCain brings those instances into his commercial to remind people what this country is about. In his own speech in the commercial he uses strong points to ensure the viewers faith in him as a president. He specifically says he is not looking to be president for the entitlement, but that he feels he owes America much more than she owes him. He also closes out the commercial with a point that if he is president we will do what we should as a country and make it a better place. Basically CANT is not a possibility. These are all very strong attributes to his campaign commercial.

In Aristotle’s list of exceptions for using rhetoric, one of them is in a situation where you are trying to prove that you are right. In a campaign it is a fight for who is the RIGHT person for the position. Therefore during a campaign you make every attempt to prove your worth and to disprove someone elses.

McCain shows our courage throughout history to stay free and strong. He makes a point in the beginning of the commercial that we will never surrender but that they will. He is using history to make a statement. We succeed in our battles and never forfeit our right to freedom. Touching on the emotional ties people have to war and what we have gone through since this country was founded makes his points ten times stronger.

Aristotle’s points that rhetoric can be used as a good thing is very agreeable. This commercial portrays McCain’s faith in America and his support and his emotional ties to it as well. It shows that he is human just like everyone else and he values America to the full extent. It shows that he is fighting to prove he is the RIGHT person for president.

This commercial uses factual references based on evidence as well as emotional references that appeal to emotions. I think the factual references it uses are not only factual but that they also have emotional pull. It also ties both the factual references and emotional references to McCain’ own words to show his trustworthiness and support for this country. It is not a commercial where he is saying he is better than Obama or pointing out the negatives in Obama. His only motive is to show his worthiness of being president because of what he believes in. I found that because he did not belittle Obama or form any negatives throughout the commercial that that made it much stronger. I felt connected to the commercial, I felt goosebumps, and it made me want McCain as president even more than I did before. I found that the rhetoric used was very beneficial and powerful. We as people are emotion based and there is no reason we should not tap into those emotions when making a decision on someone for president.

(I watched a few of Obama’s commercials and found nothing compareable to this one – in my opinion)

Some students need an authority figure to help them to focus on their work or to help them to understand better. If a teacher does not hold you accountable for your hw, assignments, or tests then who will? If it would be the responsibility of your peers to hold you accountable then would a student really feel that they were? In psychology I learned of an experiment where there was a group of people put together in a room with an experiementer telling them to do something that they would not necessarily do on their own. 66% of the students did what the experiementer told them to do, unless the experimenter left the room, put another student in charge, put a volunteer in charge, the experimenter left the room, etc. This shows that a good majority of students need an authority figure to follow directions. If the learning process was just on a peer level than the value of education would decrease.

In order for me to pay for school, enjoy it and feel that it is worth my time and money I need teachers to be able to count on. Too often in my experience have I seen my fellow students slack off or miss school or skip assignments. Those kind of people are not who I want to learn from. A teacher is someone of value to me. They are highly educated, reliable, responsible, and hold me accountable for being the student I want to be.

Society has been shaped around the idea of authority figures and although Beauvoir and Friere have good ideas I just dont see them being the best thing for the world we live in, at least not to their extreme. I strongly agree with implicating changes that go along the ideas of both of them, but not to their full extent.

Simone De Beauvoir believed that to be a full human you must not live in an orderly state where you are surrounded by rules and authority figures telling you how to live or shaping you into what they want you to believe. I think in the movie Children of Men, that is clearly not the situation for most anyone. Everyone is rebelling and doing there own thing. The world has turned into an ugly crime filled place. Theo gets presented with a situation where he must completely go against everything and he agrees to do it. His main reason may have been the money he was offered. But ultimately he found a greater purpose in it once he realized what the sacrifice was truly worth. In the movie his friend Jasper gives up his life for Theo and Key. He gives up himself for the lives of others and the start of a new beginning.

Theo puts himself in the path of danger consistently throughout the movie in order to protect Key and to protect the baby. He takes on the role of her protector without questioning it. He goes against authority and anyone who gets in the way of them and their destination. He saw the greater purpose to what he was doing. That if he could get Key to where she needed to go that there may actually be the chance of a new beginning to the end of the world and that things might actually turn around.

Theo ends up dying right when he gets Key to the boat of life. He gave up himself for her and the baby and for life in general. He risked everything and went against all odds to follow what he believed in even after the money was not in the picture anymore.

I think based on all of Theo and Jasper’s actions and sacrifices throughout the movie that they fit the fully human description that Simone believed in. They ignored authority and found meaning in life again.

Side note: I found the scene where the baby’s cry stops the war to be extremely empowering. She is almost treated as a Goddess as she walks through the crowds of people who are completely entranced by her and completely oblivious to the fact that two minutes before they were killingeach other. It really proves that the only reason the world got so ugly is because everyone had lost all their hope in anything. The war may have continued after Key and Theo had walked through the heart of it, but there is no doubt that every single person there was touched by Dylan’s magnificent cry. The cry of creation and life.

http://www.metafilter.com/61772/A-Sign-From-God

This is a non sequitur fallacy.

This statement is completely ridiculous. It’s saying that unless God believes in atheists that they must not exist. How can one say that something doesn’t exist when it obviously does? The definition of an atheist is someone who does not believe in the existence of a supreme being. You can ask around and find many people that by definition are atheists. There are people who categorize themselves as atheists publically, so there is no denying that atheists do exist. What we believe in is our own free will. How can someone say that a certain belief doesnt exist? You can believe in aliens, many people do. They may not actually exist, but the belief of aliens does exist. On the contrary if you dont believe in aliens, that doesnt mean they dont exist. It just means you dont believe in them.

If atheists do exist then God must believe in them. (lol)

This shows what the times must have been like for him. There were prejudices everywhere and the more he learned the more he realized how hypocritical America was. All the while America was preaching about how it is the land of the free it was keeping prisoners against their own will when they had done no wrong.

This story showed me how influential education can be. Learning is a powerful thing to possess. There are a lot of good and bad things in the world and if you are educated in these things you can either maintain great happiness or great sadness. In Douglass’ case, he unfortunately felt sadness in knowing what an ugly world he was surrounded by. He felt hate and disgust for his masters and he wished for something better for himself and for all the other slaves. He felt that he was more aware than the other slaves of what was going on around them. I imagine that this caused him to feel loneliness and helplessness as well.

The desire to know was present in Douglass’ life and he was lucky enough to have a mistress who allowed him to learn from her. Although she would later change her mind about wanting him to be educated she still started the beginning of his success in learning. I believe the desire of education is always there in everyone it is just a matter of the accessibility each person has available. Most of the other slaves did not have the options that Douglass did so they were not able to learn as he did.

I found this story to be very empowering, it also reminded me of the Allegory of the Cave. I found the similarity between the enlightened one (from Allegory of the Cave) and Douglass to be uncanny. ”Learning to Read” showed once again how sometimes when you are alone in what you know or what you believe in it can end up hurting you but I still believe the end result can always be extremely positive. In Douglass’ case he ended up being a leader in the abolitionist movement. Through Douglass’ strength and perseverance he made it through the bad feelings he had of being educated and took his knowledge to use it for something good.

Everyone deserves the opportunity to become educated. I see learning only as a positive ability.

Rousseau believed that the only thing we needed to make it through life was education. He used an example of a man who is born tall and strong. This man would not be able to use those positive traits in a helpful way unless he was taught how to use them. Although, I think this is a little bit literal because I believe we have the natural ability to know how to use our bodies to our advantage, I still see the point that Rousseau is making. Some of us very well may be completely helpless if it weren’t for the education that we receive throughout life. Education can come in multiple forms and each person may learn differently but ultimately we are all educated in some way or another. Whether it be by our parents, teachers, friends, siblings, or perfect strangers, there are people who can have a major impact on our life and shape us into who we are in the future.

In my own experience, I have been greatly influenced by a few people I can think of off hand, my ”gramma”, my first grade teacher, my eighth grade teacher, and my parents of course.

There are things that my gramma taught me that I still carry with me today. She was a very giving person and always thought of everyone else before herself. She showed me how to have a servant’s heart, a trait that I find to be of great quality.

My first grade teacher was the funnest teacher I had. When I was in first grade I was very much above first grade level, especially when it came to reading. So instead of having me sit in the class with all the slower readers and having me get frustrated and bored she created a reading group for a couple students. There were about 3 of us between my class and the other first grade class and when it was time for reading we would leave the class and read chapter books together. This tactic showed me that it was ok to learn in my own way and to be on another level. It showed me that it was ok to be ahead or behind and that each person should be able to learn in their own way and have that possibility put before them.

My eighth grade teacher just had amazing teaching skills. By far she was the most creative, and interesting teacher I had. She made assignments fun and unique. We had notebooks that we decorated and did very colorful projects and assignments in and then she would grade our notebooks for creativity and also for the assignment. There was something huge that she did that impacted me greatly. At the end of the year when it was time for us to graduate from junior high she had all of us fill an envelope with a list of goals we wanted to meet by the time we were graduating high school, pictures, and anything else we wanted to put in it. She told us that she would mail them to us in 2003 when we were meant to be graduating and we would be able to see how much we had grown, and changed, and if we had met any of the goals we made. I recieved my envelope in 2003 as promised and I was so surprised on so many levels. She taught me that setting goals and keeping them is a huge part of being successful and staying proud of yourself. She also showed me how committed she was to her students, to be able to hold on to our letters and remember to mail them out completely amazed me. There were many lessons outside of textbook lessons in everything she taught us.

My parents have taught me so much and impacted me in millions of ways. I wouldnt even be able to begin to describe them all. I do know that they shaped me into the woman I have become and they helped guide me down the right path, but the greatest decision they made in parenting was to let me do things on my own when I wanted to. They let me be me and let me experiment about who I wanted to be instead of pushing me in one direction or another. Granted I have made a lot of dumb choices and I have been in a lot of bad situations, but I truly believe that all that has done is make me a better person. My parents have been wonderful educators and have been extremely influential in my education process.

Rousseau wanted children to be able to have more freedom and to have more choice in the way that they learn. He believed that if children were sheltered that they would not grow up to be mature and fearless adults. The best way to overcome fear is to face it not to be sheltered from it. Rousseau wanted parents and teachers to allow their children to be curious. He believed that kids with less supervision and forceful teaching methods would grow up to be very successful, very well educated adults.

Based on my own experiences, I agree with him.

Martin Luther King believed that all races should be created equal. He believed that color didn’t matter and that there shouldn’t be separate drinking fountains and bathrooms. That African Americans should be treated the same as everyone else. That they should be able to vote and should not be forced into slavery. He had dreams and aspirations for a better life and a better world where there wasn’t so much hate and dismay. He fought hard and strong for what he believed in. He saw things in a way a lot of others didn’t or couldn’t. Martin Luther King was a strong leader and was enlightened. His faith and perseverance caused his death as he was shot by someone who could not accept his beliefs. Martin Luther King shared his dream with others and ended up paying a price because of it. On the contrary because of it he changed the course of history.

Whether you believe in God or you don’t, it has still been proven that he Jesus did exist in history and he may be the most influential figures throughout ALL history. He believed things that almost no one else did, and he was put on earth to educate others and then to be put to death. Jesus was highly informed in the things of the Lord and he traveled all over the place to share his expertise with anyone and everyone that he could. He performed miracles, and preached to thousands of people. He was a wonderful teacher and a strong leader in his time. Also during his time of discipleship he was constantly doubted and questioned, understandably so, as someone claiming to be God may be a hard thing for some people to believe. The thought of that being true is a little hard to grasp. Jesus had some very strong followers and he also had some very strong enemies. The Pharisee’s are one example of some of Jesus’ biggest enemies, they searched for him all over so that they could question him and punish him for blasphemy. They would eventually end up being the ones who put him to death. He would disappear into crowds when the Pharisee’s would get to close to catching him so that he would be able to continue his commission. He was enlightened by God and wanted to share his knowledge and wisdom with anyone who would listen to him. Not everyone took so well to the things he said but he kept doing what he was doing because he believed in himself and in God. One of his own followers then betrayed him and even though he was aware of this, Jesus let himself finally be caught and put to death. Being crucified was the only option for him to be able to impact the world in the way that he has. His death brought to life everything he believed in.

There will always be men or women that become strong leaders and die for what they believe in. Other people may not be able to accept their beliefs or understand their ethics and some may even hate them. Some people may be more enlightened than others and because of this they could be ridiculed, tested, pushed around, or even die because of it. They may not be able to make a change or show people their wisdom immediately. Some people have a hard time accepting new ideas or beliefs into their lives. If these ”Enlightened Ones” are lucky enough then they will eventually impact someone or multiple people. They may not accomplish this until after death but it is still better than never. Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Jesus have all affected history greatly even though they may not be here to see it for themselves.

In the reading Plato’s Allegory of a Cave he uses a story of someone locked in a cave that is then allowed to see the world for the first time. He was enlightened of something bigger and greater. He was filled with wisdom and experienced things that his other fellow cave friends had not. When he was put back in the cave and tried to tell his friends of the things he had seen they made fun of him. He became a person of dislike and distaste. Instead of his friends embracing his knowledge and listening to him about what he had experienced they shunned him and he was left alone. This is a good comparison to the people I have mentioned who saw something bigger and better. They saw and believed and wanted others to also. In their enlightenment they were tried and faced death because of it, but remained unfazed because to them they felt right in everything they believed in.

There is nothing better to die for than for your beliefs! The troops in Iraq die for the country they believe in everyday, a young girl in the shooting at Columbine died for believing in God. These are the kind of people who become heroes.