It s Come A Long Way From The First Draft - 1477 Words

This is the final draft of the essay. It’s come a long way from the first draft. The details are present and the thread is more clear. At least to me, the writer, it is. I’m proud of the elements I’ve chosen and of the way I’ve chosen to connect them. The use of freedom as a thread was difficult, yet the perfect challenge I needed. I love my thread, yet I’m not super confident in my imagery within the piece. I tried to incorporate more sensual imagery, but only accomplished visual imagery, a little bit of touch and smell. I’m proud of this piece merely because I managed to connect two things I absolutely love (nature and equine) with an issue we still face in this world, acceptance of others, ourselves and racism. Racism was displayed in the freedom taking of another man. Never did I think I would be able to connect these 4 completely different ideas in such a simple, yet complex way and absolutely love it. I’ve never been more excited about of a piece of writing and allowing people to read it than I am with this piece. There are so many things I’m proud of with this writing, but there are a few things I feel I’m weak in. I’m not quite sure everyone will agree with my thread being present throughout my entire essay, although I think it is, but maybe that’s because I wrote. I’m not quite sure if the repetition of the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ were effective or really necessary. And the imagery as I already said. I’m lacking the sense of taste as how do I represent taste withShow MoreRelatedI Am A Great Deal Of Anxiety Essay1145 Words   |  5 Pagesafter reading the three articles Donald M. 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Seeing the World Through a Broken Heart Free Essays

The world is a pit of suffering and pain yet we see it not. All across the world, people are suffering from injustice, oppression, and from other afflictions caused by our very own brothers yet we feel not these things, least of all, know of them. A worse thing we have done is make ourselves be the very cause of their pain as if our indifference is not enough a mockery. We will write a custom essay sample on Seeing the World Through a Broken Heart or any similar topic only for you Order Now We do not know their plight, we cannot see their sufferings, we cannot feel their pain all because our hearts remain unbroken. We think the world is confined to the corners in which we move. We have learned to deafen our ears and harden our hearts to the grave injustice and oppression that our brothers across the continents go through everyday. We have downplayed their sufferings with cliches and punchlines we learned from self-help books and by doing so, our hearts do not turn to see their reality. And then, a single movie, carrying a powerful message, turns our worlds upside down. It breaks our hearts to millions of pieces and opens the eyes of our hearts. We witness the realities of this world and we get shaken. We start to stir up inside. We begin to ponder intently and thoughtfully about what the world goes through, we start to philosophize and discuss within ourselves who we are and what man is and what does man do. We start to wander through life’s realities and we always ask why. Our hearts have been broken and now see things in their most naked honest state, and so, it refuses to rest. What is a broken heart? A broken heart simply is an honest heart. It is a heart which is not blinded with fantasies but clearly sees reality as it is. It is a heart that looks at people through a clear glass and not through a rose-tinted window. It is a heart which does not deceive itself with promptings taught by the learned but contents itself only with what it has witnessed. Hotel Rwanda Hotel Rwanda pounded on my chest like a jackhammer with a deadline. It crushed my heart down to its basic components and forced me to adopt a whole new perspective about things. I never knew that a world such as that I have seen in the movie existed. I thought people from Africa suffered only from hunger. I never knew of a racial prejudice of that magnitude. I thought only Saddam Hussein was guilty of racial cleansing. How could have I been so base so as to be ignorant of what our brothers go through? I have never seen man so vicious. I have never seen man treat their brothers as â€Å"cockroaches† all because they are of a different race. My heart was shaken and the scenes remain vivid in my mind long after I have seen the movie. Often, in solitude, I contemplate on the movie and I ponder on why man such as the Hutus will do such a thing as they have done. Their skin color was the same. The only reason for the discrimination which I could gather from the movie is that the Tutsis were taller and had the more handsome features. And I ask: what is that?! Perhaps, it is envy. As I continue to ponder, I have come to believe that envy really is one viable reason for racial discrimination. The Great Holocaust, which executed hundreds of thousands of Jews, was inspired by envy. Aryanism is built upon envy over the chosen people of God. So perhaps too, the thing that happened in Hotel Rwanda was inspired by envy. The Hutus were envious of the Tutsis because the latter had better physical features. It is a shallow reason but it is enough to cause man to want to eliminate an entire tribe of people. Envy is the second of the seven deadly sins. And rightly so. The movie has proven how deadly it is. What does envy do to man? Among lovers it has caused a lot of broken relationships, unstable marriages, and even manslaughter. Stories of lovers shooting each other because of jealousy have passed by our ears millions of times. Among families, it has caused dissension. Families get broken up because of envy. Envy has caused brothers to hate their own brothers. It is noteworthy that the first murder committed was inspired by envy. The Bible account of Cain and Abel contains the story of the first murder where Cain killed his own brother, Abel, because of envy. Among friends, envy has caused contempt. Among classes and races of people, it has caused discrimination. How to cite Seeing the World Through a Broken Heart, Papers

Black Men and Public Space free essay sample

Brent Staples (b. 1951), the oldest of nine children, was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father was a truck driver who lost his job along with 40,000 other workers in the 1960s because of plant closings in the area. The family was reduced to poverty. Staples had never considered college until a college professor took an interest in him and encouraged him to apply to a program that recruited black students. He enrolled at Widener University (B. A. 1973), where he excelled and received a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study. He took a Ph. D. in behavioral psychology at the University of Chicago in 1977. From 1977 to 1981 he taught psychology at several colleges in Pennsylvania and Illinois, but a job as a report for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1982 and 1983 began his shift to journalism. He began writing for the New York Times in 1983 and has served on the editorial board of that newspaper, for which he writes opinion pieces on race, social problems, politics, and contemporary culture. In 1994, Staples published the autobiographical Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White, which won the Anisfield Wolff Book Award and in which â€Å"Black Men and Public Space† appears. The Term public space is just 30 years old, and definitions vary. One definition states that public spaces â€Å"protect the rights of user groups. They are accessible to all groups and provide for freedom of action but also for temporary claim and ownership. A public space can be a place to act more freely† (Steven Carr, quoted in â€Å"The Death of Public Space? † at http://www. columbia. edu/_gs228/writing/histps. htm). My first victim was a woman—white, well dressed, probably in her late twenties. I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man—a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket—seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds, she disappeared into a cross street. That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into—the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken—let alone hold one to a person’s throat—I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians—particularly women—and me. And I soon gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet—and they often do in urban America—there is always the possibility of death. In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver—black, white, male, or female—hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen, bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals before there is any nastiness. I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have remained an avid night walker. In central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters. Elsewhere—in SoHo, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky—things can get very taut indeed. After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear the worst from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact. It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clears sources. As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several, too. They were babies, really—a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-twenties—all gone down in episodes of bravado played out in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow—timid, but a survivor. The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor, the most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward the company of someone who knew me. Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I entered a jewelry store on the city’s affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an enormous red Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night. Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled him from his car at gunpoint and but for his press credentials would probably have tried to book him. Such episodes are not uncommon, Black men trade tales like this all the time. Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when I’ve been pulled over by the police. And on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s four seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.