Earth Day and Human Evolution: The Humbling of Humans Essay

The celebration of Earth Day marks a stage in the development of human global awareness and thus an important step, however small or tentative, in sustained human evolution. Earth Day is all about us, as a specie, trying to reconnect with the environment that has allowed us to evolve and continues to provides us with the spatial and material context within which we continuously learn and thus evolve further. Humans are but an animal Specie, albeit a privileged one for its sentience, in the so-called Spaceship Earth. Humans were â€Å"born† in the womb of this living spaceship with its potentially finite and changing resource base. Earth has provided the unique combination of elements and conditions for a sentient carbon-based life form to evolve from being a possibly simple bacteria-like existence, to become the dominant, earth ravaging specie proudly known to itself as Homo Sapiens. Part and product of the process of evolution is the creation of awareness and consciousness. Humans, as far as we know, are the only fully self-aware and conscious of all animals with his/her ability to conceptualize, think in abstractions, and even laugh at himself and his ways. This ability to think in abstract terms has led to the notion of celebrations and Earth Day is one such human creation. The designation and celebration an Earth Day marks the maturation of the human specie, in a manner of putting, as it suggests a global awareness of the specie’s need to survive given its exploding population and resource requirements. For the specie to evolve further, it must first address the more basic issue of survival. Survival in the world today means addressing global or earth-level concerns and the celebration of Earth Day is just one simple and humble way by which humans have been humbled by the Environment.

The Loons

Journal of the Short Story in English 48   (Spring 2007) Varia †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ Jennifer MurrayNegotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã ¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Electronic reference Jennifer Murray,  «Ã‚  Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons†Ã‚  Ã‚ », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 48  |  Spring 2007, Online since 01 juin 2009, Connection on 01 avril 2013. URL  : http:// jsse. revues. org/index858. html Publisher: Presses universitaires d'Angers http://jsse. revues. org http://www. revues. org Document available online on: http://jsse. revues. org/index858. html Document automatically generated on 01 avril 2013.The page numbering does not match that of the print edition.  © All rights reserved Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† 2 Jennifer Murray Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† : p. 71-80 1 2 3 4 5 â€Å"The Loons† belongs to Margaret Laurence’s story-sequence A Bird in the House which is built around the character Vanessa MacLeod and her growing-up years in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba. Following on from the collection’s title story which has the death of Vanessa’s father as its central event, â€Å"The Loons† is set in a time prior to the father’s death and is the first of three stories which deal with Vanessa’s progressive opening up to the world around her and her increasing awareness of the suffering, poverty and forms of oppression outside of her family circle (Stovel 92). More specifically, â€Å"The Loons† gives us Vanessa’s perception of a young girl called Piquette Tonnerre who is of Metis descent and who accumulates the social disadvantages of poverty, illness, ethnic discrimination and being female.The story has been taken to task for the questionable values attached to its u se of Piquette as the stereotype of the doomed minority figure, most notably by Tracy Ware who asks: â€Å"To what extent [does this short story] confirm a debased master narrative that regards Natives as victims of a triumphant white civilization? † (71). At the same time, Ware recognizes the â€Å"enduring sense of [the] aesthetic merit† (71) of this story which so clearly has its place within the canon of Canadian literature.Evaluating the text against its depiction of the Metis can only lead to the negative conclusions that Ware arrives at, namely, that Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† falls ideologically short of the expectations of today’s politically-conscious reader. What this reading of â€Å"The Loons† does not take into account is that the â€Å"aesthetic merit† of the story is situated elsewhere—not in the portrait or role of Piquette as such, but in the story’s treatment of loss and in the central role of the fat her in the symbolics of this particular knot of meaning.In the context of the full story-sequence, loss and the father would seem more naturally associated in â€Å"A Bird in the House,† where the death of the father is the central event. In â€Å"The Loons,† the death of the father is recalled and reactivated as an informing event related to other moments in Vanessa’s life and to her relationship to others, Piquette bearing the weight of this role as ‘other’. On one level—that of Vanessa’s childhood perception of Piquette2—the story is about incomprehension, misconstruction, defensiveness and the impossibility of communication between the two girls.But the entire history of this failed relationship is revisited through the narrating voice of the adult Vanessa; in the telling of the story, she reshapes past events through the experience of loss provoked by her father’s death and invests them with symbolic value. Like the dreamer and the dream, Vanessa’s story is more about Vanessa than about those around her; it is her attempt to fit her own sense of loss into a world which is, more than she knows, beyond her.The father’s role in giving Vanessa access to symbolic values is central to the story; indeed, the first ‘event’ in the story is the father’s announcement of his concern (as a doctor) for the health of the young Piquette, who is in his care. After having prepared the ground briefly, he asks his wife: â€Å"Beth, I was thinking—what about taking her up to Diamond Lake with us this summer? A couple of months rest would give that bone a much better chance† (110).This act of social generosity, which is to involve his whole family, introduces the reader to the father’s values; it also inaugurates the continuing association in the text between the father and Piquette. The father is a reference point for Piquette; she invokes him to justify her re fusal to accompany Vanessa on a short walk: â€Å"Your dad said I ain’t supposed to do no more walking than I got to† (113), and in later years, Piquette tells Vanessa, â€Å"Your dad was the only person in Manawaka that ever done anything good to me† (116). This positive assessment of the father is Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† 3 6 the only shared ground between the girls. In response to the comment above, Vanessa â€Å"nodded speechlessly [†¦ ] certain that [Piquette] was speaking the truth† (116). In the name of her love for her father, Vanessa will make several attempts at approaching Piquette: these attempts are regularly met with rejection, leading to a moment of hurt for Vanessa: ‘Want to come and play? ’ Piquette looked at me with a sudden flash of scorn. ‘I ain’t a kid,’ she said. Wounded, I stamped a ngrily away [†¦]. 112) 7 8 This pattern recurs twice on the following page, with Piquette’s â€Å"scorn† taking on other forms —â€Å"Her voice was distant† (113); â€Å"her large dark unsmiling eyes† (113)—and her refusals becoming more verbally aggressive: â€Å"You nuts or somethin’? † (113); â€Å"Who gives a good goddamn? † (114). The impossibility of sharing between the girls is seen both from the perspective of the child Vanessa, who is mystified, â€Å"wondering what I could have said wrong† (113), and from the more experienced perspective offered by the narrated construction of events.This double vision allows the reader to see the misperceptions and involuntary insensitivity on which Vanessa’s attempts at communication are based. Where Vanessa fantasizes Piquette into â€Å"a real Indian† (112) and projects onto her the knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of nature, Piquette lives her identity as a Metis through the social rejection which characterizes Manawaka’s view of her family:   Ã¢â‚¬ËœI bet you know a lot about the woods and all that, eh? ’ I began respectfully. †¦] ‘I don’t know what in hell you’re talkin’ about,’ she replied. [†¦] If you mean where my old man, and me, and all them live, you better shut up, by Jesus, you hear? ’ (113) 9 While the child cannot understand the defensiveness of Piquette, as readers, our knowledge of Piquette’s social conditions, outlined in the opening paragraphs of the story, leads us to a position of empathy with the offended girl. Similar effects are produced by Vanessa’s enthusiasm about her summer cottage, —â€Å"‘I love it,’ I said. We come here every summer,’† (113)—expressed in the face of Piquette’s poverty, which habitually excludes her from the world of lakeside summer homes. Just as much as Piquette’s social disadvantages, Vanessa’s self-absorbed immersion in the comforts of middle-class Manawaka is the source of the girls’ mutual wariness. As the narrator of the story, the older version of Vanessa puts forward expressions of regret at the failure of the relationship between herself as a child, and Piquette.This regret, however, is not distinct from childhood, but a part of it, recounted in the past tense: â€Å"Piquette and I remained ill at ease with one another. I felt I had somehow failed my father, but I did not know what was the matter, nor why she would not or could not respond† (115). The linguistic markers â€Å"somehow† and â€Å"did not know† suggest that the emotional experience of failure remained confusing for the child, but the ability to formulate this metadiscourse indicates that things have become clearer to the adult Vanessa.This acquired comprehension allows the narrator to develop the expression of failure once again, two pages further on, including, this time, more details about the possible expectations of the father: Yet I felt no real warmth towards her—I only felt that I ought to, because of that distant summer and because my father had hoped she would be company for me, or perhaps that I would be for her, but it had not happened that way. (117) 10 Through the voice of the more experienced Vanessa, the regret of the past is understood to have been intimately related to a sense of having failed not herself, nor Piquette, but her father.The focus is on the father’s symbolic role in attributing potential value to the possibility of their friendship. Along with the father’s generosity towards Piquette, a series of other values related to the father are offered in the short story. The father’s name, MacLeod, is also the name which designates the family cottage (111), which itself is associated with nature and authenticity: it Journal of the Short St ory in English, 48 | Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† 4 11 s the father who comes and sits by the lake with Vanessa to listen to the loons (114); the lake, the nighttime, the loons, all come to signify intuitive communication (â€Å"we waited, without speaking†), mystery and transcendence (â€Å"They rose like phantom birds†), a reproach to human civilization (â€Å"Plaintive, and yet with a quality of chilling mockery, those voices belonged to a world separated by aeons from our neat world of summer cottages and the lighted lamps of home†) (114). The idea that the loons belong to a separate world is reinforced by the father’s comment that the loons had been there â€Å"before any person ever set foot here† (114).The loons are both a form of access to the continuum of natural time as opposed to civilized time, and a reminder that man cannot bridge that gap; there is therefore a form of retrospective loss attached to the image of the loons: the imagined loss of what came before and is now inaccessible. However, the birds also prefigure future loss—the enduring presence of the loons is endangered, as Vanessa tells Piquette: My dad says we should listen and try to remember how they sound, because in a few years when more cottages are built at Diamond Lake and more people come in, the loons will go away. 114) 12 We can also see the metonymic association between this loss and the approaching end of the permanence of Vanessa’s world; her father, associated with the loons in Vanessa’s childhood, is soon to disappear: â€Å"Neither of us suspected that this would be the last time we would ever sit here together on the shore, listening† (115). The symbolic charge of the loss of the loons is therefore great for Vanessa, but meaningless to young Piquette, who, on learning of the precarious situation of the birds, says: â€Å"Who gives a good god damn? (114). For Piquette, they are literally, â€Å"a bunch of squawkin’ birds† (115). Meaning is to do with symbolic construction and â€Å"The Loons†, for all of its focus on Piquette, is about Vanessa’s construction of personal meaning. Coral Ann Howells notes that Vanessa’s choosing to write about Piquette is a way of â€Å"silently displacing her own feelings into [Piquette’s] story† (41). This process is clearest in the paragraph which announces the father’s death: That winter my father died of pneumonia, after less than a week’s illness.For some time I saw nothing around me, being completely immersed in my own pain and my mother’s. When I looked outward once more, I scarcely noticed that Piquette Tonnerre was no longer at school. (115) 13 14 The words which tell of the loss of the father are almost immediately followed by words which tell of the disappearance of Piquette. This is given in the form of a neg ation: â€Å"I scarcely noticed†¦,† but what the young Vanessa had â€Å"scarcely noticed,† the narrating Vanessa gives weight to by placing it in verbal proximity to the death of the father, obliquely associating the two events.Through indirection, therefore, Vanessa speaks of her own loss. But the process is not entirely parasitic; in the telling, she also constructs Piquette. Piquette is, in some ways, a difficult character for today’s reader to take on board: like Pique, the daughter of Morag Gunn in the final Manawaka story, â€Å"The Diviners†, she â€Å"suffers from the weight of too much thematic relevance† (Howells 51) since, as I noted earlier, she accumulates an extraordinary number of handicaps, all of which are seen to be indirectly related to her Metis origins.In spite of the older Vanessa’s gentle mocking of her earlier self in her desire to ‘naturalize’ Piquette into a folkloric Indian, the story does imply that part of Piquette’s tragedy is that, like the loons, she belongs to a more ‘authentic’ heritage which has been/is being destroyed. 3 The romanticism which the narrating voice mocks is nonetheless supported by the story’s symbolism, as is the attempt to fix Piquette into a sterile, stereotyped role of ‘representativity,’ something that Piquette’s direct discourse has violently rejected.Yet, we do have access to a more tenacious Piquette; in her silences, rejections, and refusals, she is a character who is fighting for her own survival in a world clearly divided along class lines and this tenacity is seen principally in her rejection of Vanessa’s self-satisfaction. Vanessa’s sense of superiority over Piquette is implicit in the narrator’s comments about the Metis girl’s invisibility to her younger self; at that time, Piquette was but â€Å"a vaguely embarrassing presence† who â€Å"moved somewhere w ithin my scope of vision† (109). Moreover, Piquette can drop out of sight for years without notice: â€Å"I do not remember seeing her at allJournal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† 5 until four years later† (115). It would seem to be the total separateness of their social worlds that creates and sustains what might be experienced as a ‘lack of affinity’. Whereas these social differences remain unformulated to the child Vanessa, they are close to the surface for Piquette whose discourse refuses to endorse the smugness of the well-off Vanessa: ‘Do you like this place,’ I asked [†¦] Piquette shrugged. It’s okay. Good as anywhere. ’ ‘I love it,’ I said, ‘We come here every summer. ’ ‘So what? ’ (113) 15 Other details suggest a Piquette who has dreams of her own, but who cannot allow herself t o expose them to others: â€Å"When she saw me approaching, her hand squashed flat the sand castle she had been building, and she looked at me sullenly, without speaking† (113). For Piquette, the child Vanessa is a potential enemy, someone to guard oneself against. Dreams cannot be shared, and cannot even be envisaged within the society of which Vanessa is a part.Indeed, even in her later teenage years, Piquette holds no hope of improvement for herself within the confines of small-town Manawaka: â€Å"Boy, you couldn’t catch me stayin’ here. I don’ give a shit about this place. It stinks† (116). Piquette knows that Manawaka holds nothing for her in the sense that no one there believes in her chances for a better future. When she becomes engaged to be married, she remarks that, â€Å"All the bitches an’ biddies in this town will sure be surprised† (117).The implication that the town gossips have nothing good to say about Piquette is un derscored by Vanessa’s own reactions. On seeing Piquette several years after the summer at the cottage, Vanessa is â€Å"repelled† and â€Å"embarrassed† by her, and although she is â€Å"ashamed† at her own attitude, she gives way to an emphatic outpouring of animosity towards the teenage girl:   Ã‚  Ã‚  I could not help despising the self-pity in her voice. I wished she would go away. I did not want to see her. I did not know what to say to her.It seemed that we had nothing to say to one another. (117) 16 The force of this expression suggests a negative identification with Piquette on Vanessa’s part. It is as if Piquette represents the photo negative of Vanessa’s life; the result of poverty, illness, and lack of education made flesh and standing there as a threat to the integrity of Vanessa’s identity as a middle-class, reasonably well-educated girl with a future. There is no indication in the story that Vanessa ever overcomes thi s violent rejection of Piquette during the Metis girl’s lifetime.This moment of intense emotional confrontation is followed by what may be seen as the story’s signature moment: For the merest instant, then, I saw her. I really did see her, for the first and only time in all the years we had both lived in the same town. Her defiant face, momentarily, became unguarded and unmasked, and in her eyes there was a terrifying hope. (117) 17 These last two words encapsulate the relative positions of the two girls.Where Piquette ‘reveals’ her most guarded treasure—hope, arguably the most positive emotion which exists, Vanessa reproduces the condemning judgement of the town; with the word â€Å"terrifying,† she declares this hope to be without any ground. It is therefore coherent with Vanessa’s view of Piquette’s life that the Metis woman should be left as a single mother, follow in the drunken path of her father, and finally die in a hous e fire along with her two children. Vanessa’s reaction to this news is, â€Å"I did not say anything. As so often with Piquette, there did not seem to be anything to say† (119).It is not that there is ‘nothing to say’ about Piquette, but rather, that what there is to say would involve a questioning of community values which would also have to be a form of self-questioning. The narrative does not take the direction of a critique of human and social relationships; it deals with the vague sense of guilt expressed by the narrator—â€Å"I wished I could put from my memory the look that I had seen once in Piquette’s eyes† (119)—by sublimating Piquette into the symbol (along with the loons) of something lost.The ground is prepared through the falling action of the story which lists the avalanche of losses which Vanessa experiences after having heard about Piquette’s death: â€Å"The MacLeod cottage had been sold after my father ’s Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† 6 death†; â€Å"The small pier which my father had built was gone†; â€Å"Diamond Lake had been renamed Lake Wapakata†; and finally, â€Å"I realized that the loons were no longer there† (119).These different elements reinstall the triad of the father, the loons and nature as the paradigm of loss and the narrator then brings Piquette into this sphere of symbolism: I remember how Piquette had scorned to come along when my father and I sat there and listened to the lake birds. It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way, Piquette might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons. (120) 18 19 â€Å"Piquette,† â€Å"father,† â€Å"lake,† â€Å"birds,† â€Å"loons†: all of these words are given a place in the final parag raph.The narrator too, is present amongst these elements, and her place as the one who reconstructs meaning is affirmed: â€Å"I remember how [†¦]. † But it is affirmed, finally, as a process of questioning: in the phrase, â€Å"It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way,† (where it is uncertain as to whether it is the narrator’s unconscious or Piquette’s which is being invoked), the narrator seems to romanticize Piquette’s Metis status into the ‘natural’ world and confer on her the positive charge of nostalgia related to loss. In this statement of restricted awareness, it would seem that the narrator is trying to resolve the problem of her own position in relation to Piquette; the irreconcilable distinction between how she felt towards Piquette and how she felt she should have felt, if only for her father’s sake. The solution to this is to transform Piquette from the living girl—judged by society, including Vanessa and her mother—as â€Å"sullen and gauche and badly dressed,† â€Å"a real slattern,† â€Å"a mess† (118), into a symbol: a young girl, representative of an oppressed minority, with a tragic destiny, doomed to die. In this form, the loss of Piquette can be associated with both the death of the father and the disappearance of the loons; the desire to bring Piquette into this association suggests an unresolved sense of guilt—towards the girl character, on the level of the diegesis, but also towards the Metis people, whose â€Å"long silence† (108) is echoed in the â€Å"quiet all around me† experienced by Vanessa (119) as she becomes aware of the disappearance of the loons.Silenced by death, Piquette’s ‘otherness’ can be neutralized and romanticized into nostalgia. The contradictions which structure â€Å"The Loons† give the story its force. In spite of the control of the adult n arrator in the choice and ordering of memory, there is no attempt to beautify the emotions of her childhood self. The limited, often egocentric aspects of her childhood perspective are rendered, so that the reader’s sympathy goes out towards the other girl, Piquette. This construction of perspective may be een as a form of generosity, whereby, in spite of Vanessa’s statement that â€Å"there was nothing to say,† the narrator’s rendering of the past has allowed the reader to achieve an awareness of Piquette’s specificity as a character: she has moved from the general sense of absence which characterizes her in Vanessa’s memory, to a form of visibility in which the reader may see her as the victim of multiple vectors of oppression; in this context, her ‘defiance’ and ‘sullenness’ become the marks of a fighting spirit, and her ‘hope,’ the sign of her humanity.Through these effects constructed by the narrat ing voice, the earlier generosity of the father is ultimately echoed and loss takes on its complex human dimension. Bibliography Howells, Coral Ann. Private and Fictional Words : Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. London: Methuen, 1987. Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House (1970). Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Stovel, Bruce. â€Å"Coherence in A Bird in the House,† in New Perspectives on Margaret Laurence : Poetic Narrative, Multiculturalism, and Feminism.Ed. Greta McCormick Coger. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. Vauthier, Simone. â€Å"‘A Momentary Stay Against Confusion’ : A Reading of Margaret Laurence’s ‘To Set Our House in Order. ’† The Journal of the Short Story in English vol. 3 (1984): 87-108. Ware, Tracy. â€Å"Race and Conflict in Garner’s ‘One-Two-Three Little Indians’ and Laurence’s ‘The Loons. ’† Studies in Canadian Literature vol. 23:2 (199 8) : 71-84. Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons† 7 Notes   I am grateful to my colleagues in Besancon who participated in a discussion on â€Å"The Loons. † 2   See Vauthier (96-99) for a detailed analysis of Vanessa’s function as narrator (based on the short story â€Å"To Set Our House in Order,† but equally valid here). 3    Indeed, Tracy Ware argues that the association of Piquette with nature, on the basis of her Metis origins, â€Å"den[ies] Piquette her full humanity, [and it also] makes a tragic outcome inevitable. We will never be able to imagine a future for people whom we regard as separate[d] from us ‘by aeons’† (80).   Margery Fee’s comment, quoted in Ware, that â€Å"Native people [†¦] are so rarely depicted as individuals, because they must bear the burden of the Other—of representing all that the modern person has lost† (Ware 82), seems relevant to the construction of Piquette as a character who comes to bear the symbolic weight of the very idea of loss. 5   Ware declares that this symbol is â€Å"a misrecognition because it ignores the historical struggles of both Natives and Metis† (79). References Electronic referenceJennifer Murray,  «Ã‚  Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons†Ã‚  Ã‚ », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 48  |  Spring 2007, Online since 01 juin 2009, Connection on 01 avril 2013. URL  : http://jsse. revues. org/index858. html Bibliographical reference Jennifer Murray,  «Ã‚  Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s â€Å"The Loons†Ã‚  Ã‚ », Journal of the Short Story in English, 48  |  2007, 71-80. Jennifer Murray Jennifer Murray is an associate professor at the University of Franche-Comte.Her research is focused primarily on Canadian literatur e and on American writers from the South. Ms. Murray’s publications include articles on Margaret Atwood, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. She is currently working on the short stories of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. Copyright  © All rights reserved Abstract Je me propose ici d’etudier l’impact symbolique de la disparition du pere dans â€Å"  The Loons  Ã¢â‚¬ , une nouvelle de Margaret Laurence.Au niveau de l’intrigue, l’histoire est celle d’une amitie impossible entre la narratrice, Vanessa, fille de medecin, et une jeune metisse, Piquette, soignee par le pere de Vanessa. Les differences de niveau social, d’education et d’origine ethnique creent une incomprehension fondamentale entre les deux filles et vouent a l’echec les tentatives de Vanessa de sympathiser avec Piquette. Cet insucces attriste Vanessa  ; elle pense avoir decu son pere qui esperait que le sort de sa jeu ne patiente serait adouci par le contact avec sa famille.Devant son incapacite a transformer la realite et le remords qu’elle en eprouve, la narratrice transforme son souvenir de Piquette, l’exclue, en symbole. Ce symbole se developpe autour d’un noyau d’elements semantiques associes a l’authenticite, la nature, et la nostalgie du passe  ; des concepts valorises par le pere, et qui, pour la narratrice sont lies au sentiment de perte occasionne par sa mort Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007

How the legalization of marijuana would affect the economy Research Paper

How the legalization of marijuana would affect the economy - Research Paper Example These positive results mostly have a direct relation to the increased income that the local government regulation of Marijuana sales have had upon their economy. In fact, if one were to keep an open mind about the issue of Marijuana legalization and its possible positive effects on a state or national economy, one will see that the pros in this instance will definitely outweigh the cons. This paper will concentrate on highlighting the positive effects that Marijuana legalization and regulation by a local state can have on its economy. The results of which will definitely astound you and make you question why the government continues to oppose the legalization of Marijuana on a national level. Our country is struggling against consistently growing unemployment rates and is buckling under the pressure of having to balance our national budget. The recent government shutdown resulted in thousands of people being furloughed without any idea as to how and when their income will resume. The se are the true struggles of the average American struggling to make a living in what was once the most powerful and economically stable country in the world. But in Obama's America, inflation is something that nobody, not even the president himself, seems to have the power to overcome. While we spend billions of taxpayer dollars every year in efforts to shut down Marijuana clinics across the nation, we kill an industry that can very well provide jobs to our countrymen and provide the national government with billions in income that can be generated from regulated sales of the plant. Consider the following information regarding the way the government treats what is considered to be a petty drug crime: â€Å"incarcerations for what are basically petty drug crimes continue to rise: â€Å"$200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence. â€Å" (Erb, Kelly Phillips â€Å"Stirring the Pot: Could Legalizing Marijuana Save the Economy?†). With every state spe nding that kind of serious money on every Marijuana related arrest, it stands to reason that the country as a whole is overspending on the upkeep of each Marijuana grower / dealer in the country when that money can very well be allocated to more serious costs such as housing, healthcare, etc. While Washington remains oblivious to these facts, there have already been 16 states within the union that has come to see the potential benefits that the legalization of Marijuana can have on their local economy. Taking a page out of the prohibition era when alcohol was banned thus creating an underground economy that boomed without the government getting its fair share in terms of taxes. However, legalizing the use of Marijuana for medical and recreational purposes has its economic benefits as the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington have come to realize. Follow ing in their footsteps, twelve more have similar legislation pending: Alabama, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania (Erb, Kelly Phillips â€Å"Stirring the Pot: Could Legalizing Marijuana Save the Economy?†). These are the states that have woken up to the fact that there is money to be made from government regulation of Marijuana. States

Nuclear Weapons Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Nuclear Weapons - Essay Example Though the stockpiling of such weapons has been justified by many countries, notably the U.S., as being a deterrent for war, the many negative consequences associated with the use of nuclear weaponry even in a limited capacity has been loudly trumpeted by politicians, scientists, scholars and the majority of the world’s citizens alike. The term ‘limited nuclear war’ is ambiguous at best and considered an oxymoron by some who are confused by the concept of combining ‘nuclear bomb’ and ‘limited use’ together within the same phrase. The guiding principles of force used in a ‘limited war’ can be described as â€Å"the ‘minimum necessary’ and ‘the maximum feasible’† (Brown, 1988: 177). One person’s definition could include a ‘limited’ nuclear strike of a populous city, a clear violation of the moral and ethical standards of most people yet the minority opinion may be the one making that decision. The result could be catastrophic for the victims as well as the region and the collective psyche of the nation who caused the destruction. Germans for example, still have to cope with the national shame of the Holocaust. Military engagements are fraught with imprecise and unpredictable events, seldom precisely regulated. In troducing nuclear weapons escalates the engagement but does nothing to make the situation less volatile thereby only acting to exacerbate an already tense and dangerous conflict. It is unlikely that anyone could provide a reasonable argument demonstrating that using nuclear weapons on any scale could be sustained in a limited form. Nuclear weapons are immensely destructive whether large or small and even restrained use would inflict great harm to people and property. â€Å"Radiation released from each step in the nuclear weapons production cycle causes cancer, congenital defects, mental retardation, immune destruction, cancer,

Impact of IT Outsourcing and Off-shoring on Companies Research Paper

Impact of IT Outsourcing and Off-shoring on Companies - Research Paper Example Impact of IT Outsourcing and Off-shoring on Companies Information technology is an important factor in the modern world given the advance in technology. It helps firms innovate and produce high quality products that meet customer needs and demands. Due to changing business environment, firms have found it necessary to reduce operating costs while exploiting the comparative advantages of human IT skills offered by other countries (Manaschi 87). Therefore, companies have opted to outsource critical IT skills from other firms from other nations that are endowed with the expertise. In spite of the benefit of cost reduction and improved operations, IT outsourcing poses security and generic risk issues to the firm (McKendrick 130). If these issues are well managed, the outsourcing firm is likely to benefit through increased innovativeness and high product quality that could positively improve customer satisfaction hence increasing customer loyalty. This study examines outsourcing and explores outsourcing as applied in IT organizations. Outsourcing is the act in which a company or an organization pays another firm to produce goods or offer services on their behalf (Blokdjik 98). In many cases, the company could have produced the goods or offered the service themselves but sometimes it involves higher costs. Off-shoring on the other hand is a business process that companies use when they decide to relocate their operations to lower cost locations, mainly overseas.

An Allegory of Divine Wisdom and the Fine Arts by Paolo de' Matteis & Essay

An Allegory of Divine Wisdom and the Fine Arts by Paolo de' Matteis & Pictura by Frans van Mieris the Elder - Essay Example The essay "An Allegory of Divine Wisdom and the Fine Arts by Paolo de' Matteis & Pictura by Frans van Mieris the Elder" explores paintings by Divine Wisdom, Paolo de' Matteis and Frans van Mieris the Elder. Divine Wisdom is a conglomeration of many subjects to include men, women, angelic beings, and artifacts of a compass and a drawing, clock, laurel wreath, and paddle while Pictura is of a lone woman holding a palette, brushes, and a small plaster sculpture for a model for larger works. Hanging from her neck is a mask on a chain. Divine wisdom suggests a hierarchy of the disciplines where Science is paramount before Painting and Architecture, which may point to the necessity for these two fields of human interest to uphold principles, facts, and knowledge. But these may have to be tempered with Virtue, Time (the clock) and Truth (the unfolding canvass). On the other hand Pictura is said to refer to the Arts and seems to warn of the capacity of art itself to deceive sights through th e art of illusions as suggested by the mask. Both paintings expectedly were influenced by the stylistic characteristics of their period, the masters with whom the painters worked, and the clients of these painters. Paolo trained under Luca Giordano which explains his leanings toward naturalism, a trademark of the Neapolitan school. In his Divine wisdom, he employed the delicate graceful manner (the hand of Science, for example), an influence of a French master, but â€Å"broke into baroque† as exemplified by the rich his work.

Discuss Fayol's four functions in relation to an Australian Essay

Discuss Fayol's four functions in relation to an Australian organization that you are familiar with. Provide an analysis of ho - Essay Example The principles used by the management include division of work, and authority in the organisation2. Division of work is the specialization that increases the output of each individual employee. Authority enables the management to give orders to the subordinates. Unity of command and unity of function are also essential in the management functions. Remuneration principle asserts that employees should receive fair wages, with stability of tenure in their employment contract. Other principles of management outlined by Fayol include the scalar chain whereby the communication flows from the top management to the subordinates and order principle that asserts that all people and materials should be at the appropriate place in the right time3. Accordingly, the team spirit and imitativeness of employees is critical in promoting creativity in work4. Planning According to Fayol, one of the core functions of management is planning. This function entails deciding the future organizational goals a nd preparing plans of achieving the goals. Planning involves determining a future course of action and taking adequate steps of achieving the pre-determined goal5. Rio Tinto is a multinational company that has a presence in Australia. Through several mergers and acquisitions, the company has expanded to become one of the leading mining companies engaged in the mining of aluminum, uranium, coal, copper and iron ore. The Management of Rio Tinto has to prepare different types of plans. For instance, there are weekly plans, monthly plans, operational plans, tactical plans and strategic business plans. At the corporate level, the company prepares long term plans that extend more than ten years. The strategic plans include the diversification of operations and long term commitment to expanding operations in different continents. The company also prepares yearly plans that entail the expected profits and costs of operations during the year. The tactical plans of the company mainly focus of functions such as mine prospecting and exploration. Tactical plans are prepared for each department such as employee recruitment and remuneration plans, financial plans, and mining department plans. The operational plans are mainly prepared by the first level managers and outline the activities and accountabilities of the specific managers. Other plans that are common at Rio Tinto include weekly plans and daily plans of mine exploration, with accompanying details of activities to be undertaken by each employee and the supervisors6. Planning entails defining the current situation, establishing the objectives of the plans, and developing an action plan for attaining the goals7. Other elements of planning include budgeting, implementing the plans and controlling the plans. Planning should also forecast the aids and barriers to the goals of the organisation. For instance, some of the aids to achieving planned objectives in Rio Tinto include well qualified personnel and superior technol ogy. However, some barriers to planning at Rio Tinto include complexity of the plans due to unforeseen uncertainties like a possibility of cancellation of the mining rights and contracts in many jurisdictions. Some of the factors that influence the planning function in Rio Tinto include political factors, environmental factors and government control over the mining industry in many countries. Planning is important in any organisation since it enhances

What Were the Reasons for the 1905 Revolution in Russia Research Paper

What Were the Reasons for the 1905 Revolution in Russia - Research Paper Example Some 90% of the Russia people were non-landlords, and those who made up the noble class were even fewer in number. Yet these noblemen and landlords held all of the rights to political power, determination and the best parts of the land. The common people were seen as superstitious and ignorant serfs who only understood force and brutal oppression. Though Czar Alexander the II (1855-1881) attempted at reform, as seen in his Emancipation Edict of March 3, 1861, which abolished serfdom and guaranteed the right to own land, the liberty of the peasants was still out of reach. The annual sums of the government to be paid in exchange for 'ownership' of the land were oftentimes greater than the dues that the peasants had formerly paid to the serfs. Furthermore, the land of the village communities designated to the people was most likely infertile because the nobles were allowed to only give the worst parts of their estates to the people and the village communities kept village land as collec tive property, which meant that no private ownership on the part of the actual farmers was possible. With the formation of an intellectual class, industrialization which concentrated the population and revolutionary societies that could now see the discrepancy between other democratic nations, people became more aware of what kind of living standards they should be entitled to. Nicholas II (1894-1917) only fanned the flame of discontent with his dictatorial and imprudent ruling style and his German wife, Princess Alexandra, who was more than eager to guard the full autocratic power for her husband. A revolution was the only way to alter the social. Of many immediate events that spurred the revolution on, the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 22. Workers on strike, along with their families, had started out marching towards the palace as a quiet hymn singing procession. Women and children were placed at the front of the demonstrating throng in hopes of deterring violence, but after a few warning shots, Czar's soldiers shot directly at the crowd and as a result, an estimate of 1000 people died. Not only did the event demonstrate the government's ruthless indiscriminate approach in the shooting, killing the strong along with the physically weak, it also displayed the fact that protest alone can never help bring about a paradigm shift within the political structure. As shown in the film Battleship Potempkin, many of the protestors were vets from the Russo-Japanese war, who had lost limbs and became crippled for the tsar. The treatment they receive in return for such a thankless service, displayed in the shooting, sparked further d isillusionment among the mass of fighting men. It is believed that this event capsized the remaining faith the people had in the government and triggered the revolution of 1905. The massacre could not have happened in Russia, however, considering the sheer vastness of the country, without the rapid growth of a proletariat class in the industrial towns, which began in the Russian Industrialization initiated by Alexander II's.

Case Study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 7

Case Study - Essay Example Basement and much of first floor occupying the administrative office, emergency room, operations, and cafeteria were flooded to about six feet. When we inspected the premises to put up a temporary office along with surgical suites and clinical laboratory on the second floor, which was not affected by flood water, we noticed heaps of trash and debris. The task I was assigned, to guide Incident Commander on the safe entry, cleanup procedure, appropriate PPE for all recovery works, and hazard assessment for the most critical items or operations that can cause acute or chronic health effects, illness or disease, was most challenging. We recognized that without organizational skills and knowledge of time tested processes we will achieve little with manpower, massive resources, and technical expertise. Only through a definite written plan, adequate training and basic safety knowledge of the workers engaged in cleaning, and a centralized control and coordination such a herculian activity could be materialized. To achieve the goal, following broad overview of the duties and recommendations has been chartered, according to priority, and submitted to the Incident Commander: â€Å"Industrial hygienists recognize that engineering, work practice, and administrative controls are the primary means of reducing employee exposure to occupational hazards. Engineering controls minimize employee exposure by either reducing or removing the hazard at the source or isolating the worker from the hazards.† (NOSH interim recommendations for the cleaning and remediation of flood-contaminated HVAC system: A guide for building owner and managers, 2004). Being a hospital, the main Industrial Hygiene concerns for our team and the clean-up recovery workers were exposure to skin and respiratory disorders. It is possible that during flooding the systems for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) could

Change in Womens Ideals Essay Example for Free

Change in Womens Ideals Essay The United States woman between 1776 and the 1860’s varied greatly in the ways they went about achieving the ideals of their time. Both sought to better themselves and their families for the over-all betterment of their nation, but neither went about it in quite the same manner as the other. Also race was becoming less of a social barrier than it had been in the 1770’s, which is not to say, however, that it was not a significant stopping power at the time for non-whites and many immigrants from Europe, especially the women. The ideals were similar, but the ways of achieving them were very different in the 1860’s than in the 1770’s, and much more innovative for women’s status in society outside of the homestead. (Doc. C) In the aftermath of the American Revolution the idea of sexual spheres became known and widely accepted and valued. For with it came the idea of â€Å"republican motherhood†, which in essence was the idea that all males should be raised by their mother’s to be virtuous and heavily nationalistic and politically informed. While the daughters were raised to follow in their mother’s footsteps when they were eventually married away. (Doc. A) Republican motherhood also brought about the innovation of limited female education versus their previous status of no education. The general consensus was to give the females limited knowledge of how the male sphere worked so that they may better teach their son’s how to be politically correct on the subjects of their time. (Doc. B) Although the idea of republican motherhood may have opened many doors for women to make their move into society, it also helped to strengthen the idea that women are eternally inferior to men i n every way shape and form. (Doc. G) Approximately 75 years later the industrial revolution made its mark on the American economy and smashed the door wide open for females to once again wedge their foot inside the door of the male sphere of life. Women of all classes were finally given the chance to hold real jobs in society other than the responsibility of running a household or having servants run it for them. Jobs which generally included working in factories. This allowed women who weren’t married to make themselves useful for their families rather than waiting on a suitable man to ask for her hand. Most women hated working at first, but the more they did it the more pride they took in what they were doing. (Doc. D) The speed at which this transition took place is mind boggling and there were definitely some people that questioned the wiseness of putting women in mills instead of in the home to raise the children to be countrymen. (Doc. F) However, there were others that said let the gates of women’s rights be thrust open arbitrarily and let the women grow to be what they will be. It is said that there is no holier relationship than that of a mother, so if that is true then why do women not have equal rights as men (Doc. E) The lot of slaves in any time period before the WWII can be described as bleak and gruesome to the core. As they made their slow ascent to semi-equality they wreaked some of the benefits of the advance in women’s rights. As the women worked their jobs and brought more income to their families the slaves didn’t have to work in the heat of summer for as long as before. (Doc. I) However, there were some slaves that, due to the increased income to families, were purchased into families that contained lechers who would take advantage of the fact that the slaves couldn’t do anything to reciprocate the atrocities inflicted upon them. (Doc. H) As time goes by it can be observed that women’s ideals may change, but in the end they are always looking for the betterment of something else, and in this case that just so happened to be their own country. These advances in women’s lot in life helped to revolutionize the way men viewed women and more importantly how women viewed themselves. The lie that women are inferior to men had been alive so long that I think they had actually begun to believe it themselves. So their general ideals may not have changed but the way women were treated in society would never go back.

Hans Asperger Overview

Hans Asperger Overview What Sister Viktorine Knew Neurotribes, neuodiversity, steve sibberman, autism In 1931, Gottfried K. was brought to the Childrens Clinic at the University Hospital in Vienna by his grandmother for an examination. He was nine and a half years old, but so physically uncoordinated that Anne Weiss, a young psychologist working at the clinic, assumed that he was feebleminded. His grandmother told Weiss that she too was often confused by his behavior, but Gottfried was clever and smart. Weiss listened carefully, taking notes. His grandmother had brought him to the right place. She looked forward to discussing this case with her colleagues, especially Hans Asperger, the new pediatrician who seemed to take a special interest in gifted, sensitive children. Hans Asperger, the eldest of three boys, was born in Austria in 1906. But his brothers died young, and he became the only child. In his early life, he joined a group of young people who called themselves the Wandering Scholars, heading off on month long hiking trips to read poetry aloud in the wilderness. He met his wife-to-be, Hanna Kalmon, on one of these trips. After graduating from the University of Vienna, Asperger was assigned by his mentor, Franz Hamburger, to the Childrens Clinic at the University Hospital. The University Hospital was one of the most prestigious hospitals in the city. Doctors from all over Europe came to the city to observe surgeries in vast operating theaters and consult with the leading experts in the field. Since the mid 1910s, Vienna had hosted ongoing salons where physicians and scientists mingled with artists and musicians to discuss politics, art, science, and philosophy. Much of this cultural ferment originated in Viennas lively Jewish community, which dated back to the 12th century. In the years after the World War I, one in five inhabitants of the city was Jews, as were many of the faculty members who taught at the university. The Childrens Clinic was founded by a physician and social reformer named Erwin Lazar. By combining elements of medicine, psychology, and progressive pedagogy, Lazar developed an approach to helping children attain their potential based on the 19th century concept of Heilpà ¤dagogik, therapeutic education. The tight-knit staff at the special-education unit, known as the Heilpà ¤dagogik Station, included Asperger, Weiss, psychiatrist Georg Frankl, psychologist Josef Feldner, and a nun named Sister Viktorine Zak. Their approach to diagnosis was based on a method of intensive observation developed by Lazar. Lazar believed a childs true condition could only be measured by watching the child in the course of his or her daily life. Putting children through a battery of tests was not enough. No one mastered this intimate style of observation better than Georg Frankl, who had become Aspergers chief diagnostician. On his first day at the hospital, Gottfried did nothing but cried. But he adapted to his new life gradually. The reliable rhythms of the daily schedule seemed to comfort him. As Weiss got to know him better, she came to see the nine-year-old Gottfried was precociously smart, but he was unaware of things that most kids know instinctively. He didnt know how to play the games around him to his own advantage. Weiss published her in-depth case study of Gottfried in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in 1935 after she emigrated to America in 1934. *** Over the course of a decade, Asperger and his staff examined over two hundred children who displayed the same cluster of social awkwardness, precocious abilities, and fascination with rules, laws, and schedules. They also saw several teenagers and adults who fit the same profile. Asperger believed they represented a distinct syndrome that was not at all rare but had somehow escaped the notice of his predecessors. In fact a Russian psychiatrist named Grunia Sukhareva had written about a similar group of young people with prodigious abilities in art and music two decades earlier in Moscow. She believed her patients had a disorder resembled schizophrenia with an essential difference. While adult schizophrenics always deteriorated, her patients often made dramatic improvements. She called this syndrome schizoid personality disorder. Though Asperger was unaware of Sukharevas work, he noted his patients condition was similar to the condition referred to as autistic thinking by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. In 1908, Bleuler used the term autistic to describe a schizophrenic patient who had withdrawn into his own world. Asperger used the term autistic psychopathy to describe their condition. In a postgraduate thesis, Asperger described   prototypical cases named Fritz V., Harro L., Ernst K,. And Hellmuth L. Asperger was struck by these boys natural aptitude for science. He recognized that his patients blatant disregard for authority could be developed into the skepticism indispensable to any scientist. He called this distinctive cluster of aptitudes, attitudes, skills, and abilities autistic intelligence. His job as the staff of the Heilpà ¤dagogik Station was to teach these kids how to put their autistic intelligence to work. He called them his little professors. Asperger noted that many of these kids fathers and grandfathers were engineers and scientists, showing that the disorder might be genetic. But he cautioned that it would be foolish to search for a single gene responsible for such a complex range of behaviors and traits as these conditions were undoubtedly polygenetic. When Asperger submitted his thesis to Hamburger in 1943, the Nazis had occupied Austria five years earlier. Of the 200 senior members of the medical faculty, fewer than 50 remained. Aspergers colleagues, Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl, had fled the country, and many others were in exile, imprisoned in concentration camps, or dead of suicide.   Asperger was speaking out for the sake of children who had not yet been murdered by a monstrous idea of eugenics imported from America. *** The word eugenics (which means well-born) was coined in 1887 by a British named Francis Galton, the younger half cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton distinguished himself by his ability to recognize patterns. He popularized the notion of regression toward the mean in statistical analysis and the use of fingerprints in the science of forensics. Eugenics policies were first implemented in the United States. In 1909, the state of California passed a law granting public-health officials the right to sterilize convicts and the mental patients in California. Thirty other states had passed similar laws, and a wave of sterilization swept through asylums and prisons coast to coast. In October 1921, the Second International Congress of Eugenics was held as a gala week long event at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, New York. The event was sponsored by the nations most prestigious museums and promoted in journals like Science and the Scientific Monthly. In the welcome address to the congress, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museums president, urged his fellow scientists to enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feebleemindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases. As influential as they were at home, American eugenicists received an even warmer welcome in Germany. A 1913 textbook by Geza von Hoffman called Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Racial Hygiene in the United States) became the seminal guide to applied eugenics students in Germany. Incarcerated in the Landsberg Fortress in 1924, Adolf Hitler learned about eugenics from The Passing of the Great Race, written by a Yale graduate named Madison Grant. Grant mentioned that Galtons strategies for encouraging men and women of the genius-producing classes to mate would not stop the rising tide of idiocracy. He directed his fellow eugenicists to develop more expeditious means of eliminating the weak and the unfit. It was music to Hitlers ears. From his prison in Landsberg, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his deputy Rudolf Hess saying that as a compassionate defense of the lives of children yet unborn, the future Fà ¼hrer put forced sterilization at the core of his vision of a new society. As the National Socialist party rose to power in the 1930s, the body of American eugenic law became the blueprint for Nazi policies to defend Aryan from negative genetic influences. Unlike their American counterparts, German eugenicists did not plan to limit their efforts to asylums, prisons, and mental institutions. Instead, they aimed to carry out the implications of eugenic theory to their fullest extent. In July 1933, they enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring to sterilize any German citizen who showed signs of schizophrenia, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, Huntingtons disease, inherited blindness or deafness, or epilepsy. In June 1934, the Nazis assassinated the Fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and replaced him with a pro-German and anti-Semitic successor. By 1935, a massive exodus from Austria was under way, prompted by new laws stripping Jews of property, jobs, and basic rights of citizenship. Anni Weiss was the first of Aspergers team to leave, arriving in America in 1934. The clinics gifted diagnostician, Georg Frankl, left in 1937, emigrating to Maryland with the aid of a Jewish doctor who had left Austria years earlier. On March 12, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. Gangs of civilians calling themselves Rolllkommandos looted department stores and shops in the Jewish quarter, often assisted by the police. Within weeks, the University of Vienna was transformed into the intellectual center of an academic movement to put racial improvement and racial research at the top of the medical agenda. Before the Anschluss, more than 5,000 physicians were practicing in Vienna, by the fall of 1938, less than 750 would remain. Many former professors at the university died in concentration camps. Others took their own lives. In 1938, Aspergers mentor Franz Hamburger gave a lecture to the society titled National Socialism and Medicine, affirming his support of the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. On October 3, Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history, in a lecture hall at the University Hospital. He launched into the case histories of his patients, putting his audience on familiar turf. Then he proposed a radical way of thinking about cognitive disabilities that is opposite to the dogma of racial hygiene. He said the therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear their difficulties, not to eliminate them. Unfortunately, his strategy of accentuating the positive to his Nazi superiors by basing his four prototypical cases on his chatty little professors rather than on the more profoundly impaired children he saw in the institutes, would contribute to widespread confusion in the coming decades. On the basis of the four prototypical boys in Aspergers thesis, many clinicians assumed that he saw only highly functioning children in his practice, which ended up obscuring his most important discovery that autism was found in all age groups, and had a broad ra nge of manifestations. That night was the beginning of Yom Kippur, the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. For the next 24 hours, storm troopers and Rollerkommandos made brutal raids in the Jewish neighborhood, stealing, burning, plundering, and killing. A month later, on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, ninety-five synagogues in Vienna went up in flames, and Jewish homes, hospitals, schools, and shops were demolished with sledgehammers. In Berlin, more than thirty thousand Jews were dragged off to concentration camps. Meanwhile, Aspergers old colleague, Erwin Jekelius, was rising through the party ranks and became the director of Am Spiegelgrund (formerly known as Am Steinhof), the largest mental hospital in Vienna. He was later called the mass murderer of Steinhof when he helped the Nazis started their euthanasia program. In 1941, Hitler arrested him when he fell in love with Hitlers sister, Paula Hitler. After a brief stint in jail, Jekelius was drafted into the army and sent to the Russian front, where he was captured by the Red Army soldiers. He died at the age of forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. *** On February 20, 1939, a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar was born in Leipzig. He was born blind and intellectually disabled, with one arm and only a partial leg, and he was prone to seizures. The birth of Gerhard Kretschmar provided an opportunity that Hitler had been waiting for since his days in Landsberg prison. Hitler dispatched his personal physician to examine the child and gave orders to carry out euthanasia. In August, the Committee for the Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments issued a decree calling for the registration of all children born with congenital abnormalities of any kind. Doctors and midwives were required to report all cases to the committee. On September 1, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, officially starting World War II. In December, Hitler signed a secret order authorizing the creation of a program call Aktion T-4, short for Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care in Berlin. Closed door meetings were held throughout Germany and Austria to educate medical students about child euthanasia and T-4, which primarily targeted disabled adults. These programs became fertile ground for medical research that could not have been conducted in contexts where the patient was expected to live. More than 200,000 disabled children and adults were murdered through these official programs, and thousands more were killed by doctors and nurses on their own initiative. *** Asperger had never joined the Nazi party, according to his daughter, because of his loyalty to the Wandering Scholars. He refused to report his young patients to the Reich Committee, which created a dangerous situation for him. The Gestapo had showed up twice at his clinic to arrest him. Both times, Franz Hamburger had used his power as a prominent Nazi party member to intervene in his favor. By then, the Reich needed doctors on the front lines, and Asperger was drafted into the German army to serve as surgeon in a field hospital in Croatia. In September 1944, while Asperger was still in Croatia, the Allies bombed the Childrens Clinic, reducing the Heilpà ¤dagogik Station to rubble. As the ceiling gave way, Sister Viktorine threw her arms around one of her boys to protect him. They were buried together.

Appearance Vs. Reality Essay -- essays research papers

One of the characteristics of Realism, in American literature at least, is the ironic use of perceptions of â€Å"appearance† vs. â€Å"reality.† With this in mind, Henry James’s â€Å"The Real Thing† and â€Å"The Beast in the Jungle† are two works wherein such characteristics can be shown to operate as James employs cleverly woven twists of â€Å"appearance† and â€Å"reality† in each of the plots. In James’s â€Å"The Real Thing,† the plot is centered on an unnamed artist and his interactions with two sets of models: the Monarchs (members of genteel society), and Miss Churm and Oronte (members of the working class). The ironically named Monarchs are a couple who appear as though they have â€Å"ten thousand a year† but whose lives diverge dramatically from the literal definition of a monarch. Upon introduction to the artist, they unwittingly deceive him into initially assuming that they are interested in commissioning a portrait; in fact, the Monarchs are seeking work as sitters. The case of mistaken identity is further compounded by the artist who pretends to be a â€Å"great painter of portraits† but who is actually an illustrator whose depictions of nobility constitute his main source of income – his â€Å"pot-boilers.† James’s introductory interplay of character identity with appearance and reality serves as a clever backdro p for the story where reality conflicts with appearance. While their outward social appearance and actions have an â€Å"indefinable air of prosperous thrift† and personify that of high-class society, the Major and Mrs. Monarch are actually penniless and no longer members of the genteel sect. But the Monarchs are unable to resolve their â€Å"appearance† of high society with their â€Å"reality† of financial destitution, and remain psychologically entrapped in a self-imposed netherworld of pseudo-culture and pseudo-class. Insistent upon being treated as members of the high society to which they no longer belong, the Monarchs also present a conflict of appearance and reality for the artist because he is forced to allow them the social deference of portrait sitters, yet pay them as models (viewed as their â€Å"superior but not their equal†). The complexity of appearance vs. reality is further illustrated when the artist realizes that while Major and Mrs. Monarch may appear to be the â€Å"real thing,† he i s unable to transform their outward reflection of nobility onto his canvas without sacrificing his ... ...m. James counters Marcher’s emotional distance from reality with May Bartram’s embrace of life – and love. But it is through the voyeuristic glimpse into Marcher’s internal machinations that readers understand the waste of a life based upon appearances. Like the Monarchs in â€Å"The Real Thing† whose marriage to appearances entrapped them in world devoid of emotion, John Marcher’s identity is innately linked to â€Å"fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, and treasures of the arts† and he is similarly constrained in a self-imposed world of apathy. Although it appears that Marcher has an enriched life, he is actually a man with â€Å"†¦ rather colourless (emphasis added) manners† who is satisfied to wait for the elusive â€Å"great thing† to happen. Because Marcher remains afraid to confront the â€Å"beast† (the metaphoric unknown in life), it is not until the death of May Bartram that he realizes her love for him was the â€Å"great thing,† and that he was waiting for something that he unknowingly possessed. The simple truth that John Marcher recognized – albeit too late – is that â€Å"It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonour ed, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.†

Geothermal Energy Essays -- Science Energy Chemistry Essays

Geothermal Energy Geothermal energy is a superior source of energy because it is constantly being produced. Radioactive decay of nuclei with long half lives that were imbedded in the Earth’s interior during its genesis accounts for seventy percent of the globe’s internal energy. The remainder of this energy is derived from either the residual heat left over form the Earth’s formation, gravitational forces, or meteorite impacts. Geothermal energy is available anywhere on the planet. On average the Earth emits one sixteenth of a watt per meter squared, however this number can dramatically increase in regions near volcanoes, hot springs and fumaroles. Therefore, the uniqueness of each location around the world causes the Earth’s internal heat to be stored underground in many different natural structures. In some areas, the globe’s heat is stored in the rocks that form the Earth. There is a normal temperature increase, called the Normal Geothermal Gradient, of 30 degrees Celsius for every kilometer dug below the Earth’s surface. However, the precise amount of temperature increase that occurs as one’s depth increases is not a constant over the entire surface, it depends on the rock’s temperature. Therefore, in hotter sections of the planet there is Hot Dry Rock which produces an increase in temperature of forty degrees for every kilometer dug below the surface. In additi on, a reserve of geothermal heat even hotter than the solid rock type is molten magma, which is melted rock. Also, some regions of the planet house underground aquifers that use water to store large quantities of heat. Some areas contain vast hot water pools deep below the surface called Hot Water Reservoirs. In other places the conditions are r... ...ability it will surely be developed much more extensively in the near future. This source of energy will also be able to be used for a long time into the future because geothermal energy’s sources will continue to replace the energy used. In addition, it is estimated that the Earth can produce 600,000 exajoules of energy over five million years. This rate is believed to be enough energy to fulfill human energy requirements for the rest of the biosphere. Sources For my sources, I used the text book, Energy and the Environment and the following websites. †¢ http://www.eren.doe.gov/geothermal/ †¢ http://www.h2ssafety.com/hydrogen_sulfide.htm †¢ http://www.geothermie.de/egec_geothernet/menu/frameset.htm †¢ http://www.worldbank.org/html/fpd/energy/geothermal/markets.htm †¢ http://www.worldbank.org/html/fpd/energy/geothermal/ †¢ http://www.ees4.lanl.gov/hdr/

My Personal Philosophy of Education Essay -- Teaching Education Essays

My Personal Philosophy of Education Without education, society as we know it would cease to exist. Formal education is what has made our country and other industrialized nations great. Thus, as a future educator, I anticipate the opportunity to assist in the molding of future generations by imparting essential knowledge. The famous philosopher and educator, John Dewey, once said, "Education is the process of living through a continuous reconstruction of experience. It is the development of all those capacities in the individual which will enable him to control his environment and fulfill his possibilities." Identifying with Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, I believe that children are ultimately shaped by their environmental experiences and must be taught how to use their knowledge as responsible, productive citizens. The educational process must begin with and emphasize the interests of the students, while focusing on their growth in all aspects of their beings. As a facilitating instructor, I plan to construct an eclectic blending of a student-centered, yet authoritative, classroom. In this respect, I will take both a demanding and responsive approach to teaching, while still allowing my students to remain actively involved in the learning process. My aim is to increase the motivation of children by providing them with reasonable choices regarding structure and materials. Focusing on problem solving activities, rather than mere rote learning and dogmatic instruction, I shall strive to develop students' abilities to think analytically and creatively. At the same time, however, I hope to improve their social skills by engaging them in real-world activities. I intend to take an idealistic a... ...provement of teaching and learning as well as the creation of reflective practitioners in the classroom. In fact, I look forward to the day when I can begin the national certification process and prove myself a sound and solid educator. Although the most important part of being an educator rests on focusing upon the needs of students when making classroom decisions, moreover, I consider the blend of philosophies which I advocate to be essential aspects of a school's curriculum. I believe that they will not only assist me in shaping the lives of my students when I begin teaching but will also aid me throughout the completion of my academic career. As I work toward a master's degree in the field of special education, after my graduation from Concord College, my educational philosophy will continue to grow. It will keep me grounded as a professional educator. My Personal Philosophy of Education Essay -- Teaching Education Essays My Personal Philosophy of Education Without education, society as we know it would cease to exist. Formal education is what has made our country and other industrialized nations great. Thus, as a future educator, I anticipate the opportunity to assist in the molding of future generations by imparting essential knowledge. The famous philosopher and educator, John Dewey, once said, "Education is the process of living through a continuous reconstruction of experience. It is the development of all those capacities in the individual which will enable him to control his environment and fulfill his possibilities." Identifying with Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, I believe that children are ultimately shaped by their environmental experiences and must be taught how to use their knowledge as responsible, productive citizens. The educational process must begin with and emphasize the interests of the students, while focusing on their growth in all aspects of their beings. As a facilitating instructor, I plan to construct an eclectic blending of a student-centered, yet authoritative, classroom. In this respect, I will take both a demanding and responsive approach to teaching, while still allowing my students to remain actively involved in the learning process. My aim is to increase the motivation of children by providing them with reasonable choices regarding structure and materials. Focusing on problem solving activities, rather than mere rote learning and dogmatic instruction, I shall strive to develop students' abilities to think analytically and creatively. At the same time, however, I hope to improve their social skills by engaging them in real-world activities. I intend to take an idealistic a... ...provement of teaching and learning as well as the creation of reflective practitioners in the classroom. In fact, I look forward to the day when I can begin the national certification process and prove myself a sound and solid educator. Although the most important part of being an educator rests on focusing upon the needs of students when making classroom decisions, moreover, I consider the blend of philosophies which I advocate to be essential aspects of a school's curriculum. I believe that they will not only assist me in shaping the lives of my students when I begin teaching but will also aid me throughout the completion of my academic career. As I work toward a master's degree in the field of special education, after my graduation from Concord College, my educational philosophy will continue to grow. It will keep me grounded as a professional educator.

Department of Planning Essay

Prescribed Text There is no prescribed text for this course. Course materials will be provided electronically via Cecil. Lecturers will provide additional reading lists for their particular sections of the course. Preparation Approximately 1 hour preparation is expected for every one hour of class time. You will be required to complete readings allocated in class, in preparation for the next class. However, students are encouraged to add time for background reading. This is particularly important for international students and students for whom English is not their first language. Course Assessment Course assessment is comprised of: Law Assignment (15%)Friday 23 August 2013 at 10AM Class Test (15%)Friday 30 August 2013 at 9AM (1 hour) Politics Essay (20%)Thursday 17 October at 10AM Examination (50%)3 hour examination scheduled for the end of semester 2 When submitting assignments and essays, please use the Planning cover sheets provided beside the assignment hand-in boxes on level 4. Please ensure that you read the academic policies and procedures information in the Planning Undergraduate Handbook at the outset of this course. You will be treated as having read this information. Brief Description of the Course Content This course introduces students to key aspects of New Zealand’s legal system. This is complemented by consideration of the development of local government legislation and by comprehensive discussion of the functions and relationships between essential institutions of a representative democracy. Treaty of Waitangi issues are an integrated aspect of this course. Learning Outcomes The learning outcomes of this course include: * acquisition of basic statutory interpretation skills and case law analysis; * an understanding of the core structure, processes and issues inherent in the New Zealand legal system; * an overview of local government reform since 1989; * an understanding of the relevance of the Treaty of Waitangi to institutional and legal frameworks in New Zealand; and * an understanding of key political institutions and processes in New Zealand. Structure Julia Harker will begin the course by lecturing on the New Zealand legal system. This will be followed by a series of lectures given by Ian Munro on local government. After the mid-semester break, Vernon Tava will give a series of lectures on the New Zealand political system. Lena Henry will take the remainder of the course, lecturing on Treaty of Waitangi issues. Reading list relating to the New Zealand Legal System In addition to the prepared course materials: R Miller (ed) New Zealand Government and Politics (OUP, 4th ed, 2006), in particular: Part B – chapters 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 and chapter 3.7. Webb, Sanders and Scott The New Zealand Legal System: structures, processes and legal theory (Butterworths, 5th ed, 2010). R D Mulholland Introduction to the New Zealand Legal System (Butterworths, 10th ed, 2001). G Palmer Unbridled Power (OUP, 1987). G Palmer and M Palmer Bridled Power (OUP, 2004). K Palmer Local Authorities Law in New Zealand (Brookers, 2012). See The Constitution Conversation website for resources

Evaluate One Philosophical Theory That Tries to Deal with Agrippa’s Trilemma.

Evaluate one philosophical theory that tries to deal with Agrippa’s Trilemma. Agrippa’s Trilemma gives us the three possibilities when trying to justify a belief. The first is that our beliefs are unsupported; the second that there is an infinite chain of justification; the third being that there is a circular chain of justification. One theory that tries to deal with this is foundationalism, which suggests the first option of Agrippa’s Trilemma is true. Throughout this essay I will argue why although one of the more popular theories, it still has its flaws.Foundationalism suggests that the first option of Agrippa’s Trilemma- that there are beliefs that can be unsupported- is correct for certain ‘foundational’ beliefs. The epistemic regress argument, as explained well Richard Fumerton, shows how this is likely to be the case. It’s best to explain this with an example. Let’s say, a man comes up to you and tells you it is going to rain tomorrow, and as evidence he says ‘because the winds are going to change direction’. You ask him why he thinks this, and he says he just ‘has a feeling’.Naturally you take this as nonsense, a poor justification for his claim, and don’t believe him. This shows us then that to be justified in believing something, P, because of E, you must be justified in believing E. However, let’s say his justification for believing E- that the winds were changing bringing rain- was that he saw it in a gypsy’s crystal ball. Though he may think this is a good justification because he believes in that sort of thing, you are sceptical and again dismiss his claim.This brings us to expand our first principle to what is known as the Principle of Inferential Justification (PIJ): ‘To have justification for believing P on the basis of E one must not only have (1) justification for believing E, but (2) justification for believing that E makes probable P . ’ (Fumerton, 2002) From the PIJ we can easily show how the epistemic regress argument unfolds. Going back to the example, if you were to believe P, there must be another proposition you could legitimately infer it to be true; E1.But, surely the only way E1 could justify you that P is true is if E1 is itself justified, and if justification is inferential then it would mean E1 would have to be legitimately inferred from another proposition; E2. As you can see this would go on and on infinitely, hence why it’s a ‘regress’ argument (Fumerton, 2002). The solution would be to reach a proposition that didn’t need any further justification, one that was noninferential- self-justifiable- and so could be a ‘foundational’ belief.One foundational belief thought up by Rene Descartes is that he existed, in his famous Cotigo Ergo Sum ‘I think, therefore I am’ meditation (Descartes, 1641). From being sure of his existence he then tried t o build more beliefs, which is how foundationalism works. The idea of his existence is, to him, infallible, and therefore it could theoretically be used as foundation on which to build more beliefs. However, even such foundations such as the existence of one’s self can be called into question. It is believed that truly infallible beliefs are very few, or arguably do not exist at all (Pritchard, 2006, 41).This is a problem because, even if a truly infallible belief or beliefs can be deduced, they would be too few and too narrow to be able to build a complex series of beliefs on top of. What I mean by this is that the path from basic foundational beliefs to derived beliefs would be very tricky to bridge. Pritchard used the example of believing 2+2=4 as infallible. How then, he argued, would he deduce from this belief that he is sitting at his desk? The problem with suggesting the foundational belief must be infallible is that it is too strict. Logical entailment’- where p logically follows a proposition q, therefore p cannot be true without q being true- is a key part of foundationalism, and so foundationalists with the belief that foundational beliefs must be truly infallible have to deal with this problem (Foundationalism, n. d. ). In response to this, Pritchard goes on to say you could argue that fallible beliefs perhaps could be used as a foundation. The reasoning for this is because infallible beliefs are too strict so perhaps the only option is to open up to such beliefs.An example would be sensory beliefs; perhaps these should be accepted as foundational beliefs. However he acknowledges that this does create another problem: that you would have to argue why you think these deserve to be foundational beliefs. Surely though, sensory beliefs such as ‘there is a book on my desk because ‘I can see it’ have some doubt, and still require justification of their own? The doubt I am referring to is you could, however unlikely, be ha llucinating the book and therefore are not fully justified in believing it is there.Your senses cannot be fully trusted. You would have to then justify, surely, ‘how do you know your eyes are seeing a book and your brain isn’t just hallucinating’, and by doing this you are proving that sensory beliefs are not fully grounded foundational beliefs. This argument is similar to the ‘evil demon argument’ and dream argument’, as they also dismiss sensory beliefs as foundational (Descartes, 1641). This shows that fallible beliefs also have their problems. Some argue that these non-inferential justified beliefs simply don’t exist.Let’s say that statement P is claimed to be a non-inferential justified belief. For subject S to be justified in believing P is true, he must have a reason. He must also therefore have a belief in which gives him this reason to justify his believing in P. But how can this be, that S relies on another belief? By b eing inferentially justified, it has just contradicted itself (Pojman, n. d). However a counter for this by some foundationalists would simply be that there needn’t be a reason for believing P but P itself, as is the definition of a ‘self-justifiable’ belief.So, I believe the argument for foundationalism is a good one because as finite beings we cannot deal with an infinite chain of justifications. There must be a bottom, such as Descartes foundational belief. I cannot, however, ignore the arguments against foundationalism. Fallible beliefs should be dismissed as they are flawed from the start, because claiming a belief that can be doubted as fully-grounded is doomed to fail from the start. The problem of moving basic beliefs on to more complex derived beliefs is harder to counter, but I’d still say that infallible foundational beliefs are still the strongest argument for foundationalism.Perhaps it is just that no philosopher has yet discovered undeniable non-inferrential foundational beliefs so far. Word count – 1140 Bibliography Descartes, R (1641) ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, in John Cottingham (ed) ‘Meditations on First Philosophy: Cambridge University Press, 13-15, 17 Fumerton, R. (2002) ‘Conditions and Analyses of Knowing’, in Moser, P. (ed. ) The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology Oxford: OUP, 204-33. Foundationalism. (1999) [ONLINE] Available at: ]. Pojman, [ONLINE] Available at: [Accessed 18 November 12] Pritchard, D. (2006) What is this thing called knowledge? London: Routledge, 39-41

The Yellow-Wallpaper Analysis

The Yellow Wall-Paper Literary Analysis Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her short story â€Å"The Yellow Wall-Paper† to show how women undergo oppression by gender roles. Gilman does so by taking the reader through the terrors of one woman’s changes in mental state. The narrator in this story becomes so oppressed by her husband that she actually goes insane. The act of oppression is very obvious within the story â€Å"The Yellow Wall-Paper† and shows how it changes one’s life forever. The story begins with the narrator’s use of dramatic irony which already tells the reader that something is suspicious about her. John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage† (508 Gilman). The narrator, which is unknown, states her husband, John, laughs at her but she expects it. In a good marriage, one does not expect their spouse to laugh at them. Even from the first paragraphs, it is obvious the narrator allows herself to be inferior to men. S he minimizes herself several more times throughout the story. â€Å"So I take my phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is – and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again† (508 Gilman).The narrator’s husband is a high standing physician and gives her drugs that will supposedly help her get well. The section â€Å"phosphates or phosphites† gets my attention. A first read of these lines might cause the reader to think she is just a normal woman being prescribed drugs. However, the narrator does not know exactly what type of drugs she is taking. John sees his wife as another patient and nothing else. You see, she takes them simply because her husband is a physician and says they will help her. John is clearly in control of her. Also, the narrator states she is forbidden to work until she is well.John is making sure she does not try to do any type of work at all. He has strict orders for her, one of them being to stay in bed. There are signs of oppression on the first page and more will come. The next quote explains to the reader what types of items are located in the room John chose for the narrator. â€Å"It was a nursery first and then a playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls† (509 Gilman). Here, the narrator explains to the reader that there are bars on the windows and chained rings coming from the walls.The narrator’s use of the words â€Å"barred† and â€Å"rings† make it very clear that this room was never made for children; it was made to control and isolate a mentally ill person. Convincingly, John told her the nursery was the most ideal place for her to rest and get well. Being lesser than John, the narrator has no authority over him. She has no choice. He controls what she does no matter how she is feeing. From the first gla nce, the reader can understand that this room was not designed for children. Furthermore into the story, the narrator states she enjoys writing.She feels better when she writes, as if it is healthy for her. She writes, â€Å"There comes John, and I must put this away – he hates to have me write a word† (509 Gilman). The most important part regarding this statement is John has told her to discontinue her writing all together because it is unhealthy for her. John has shattered her self-confidence by controlling her; therefore she does not say a word regarding the relief writing brings her. The reader must recognize the phrase â€Å"he hates me to write a word† to understand the full emphasis of how John feels about his wife writing.She is becoming awfully depressed because of his oppression. More so, John says everything he is doing is helping her get well. She is his main concern. Again, because of John’s utmost control, the narrator does not tell him she is not feeling any better. She cannot share her feelings with him for he will laugh at her. In this quote, John says, â€Å"and really dear, I don’t care to renovate the house just for three months’ rental† (510 Gilman). Here, John states he is not going to change the wallpaper because they will only be in the house for three months. The key words in this line are â€Å"three months†.These words mean the narrator has to stay in the room with the barred windows and hideous, yellow wallpaper for a total of three months. These keywords might be missed if read over too quickly. The quote needs to be read slowly to realize what is happening. The reason they are only there for three months is because the treatment John has given her is going to take three months. The narrator does not realize this. Under his rule, she cannot stop the treatment. With the ending near, the narrator gradually descends into madness. While examining the wallpaper closely at night she narrates, â€Å"The woman behind it shakes it! she writes, â€Å"and she crawls around fast and her crawling shakes it all over. † â€Å"And in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard† (Gilman 516). The woman that the narrator sees is actually herself. It is a projection of her because she cannot escape John’s control just how the woman cannot escape the wallpaper. Her illness has become so great she thinks a woman is shaking the wallpaper around the entire room. The problem here is John’s treatment. It has caused her to believe in ghostly objects that do not exist. The phrase, â€Å"her crawling shakes it all over† shows how John’s treatment has affected her.The narrator crawls and creeps around the room. She goes around in circles over and over again with no hesitation. Another phrase, â€Å"she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. † This is the narrator shaking the barred windows try ing to escape the room. The narrator knows you cannot escape because â€Å"nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so;† (517 Gilman). This compares to John’s control. He â€Å"strangles† her with his treatment. The narrator is trying to express her feelings but she cannot because the wallpaper consumers her every minute. Her feelings cannot escape the room; they are within the yellow wall-paper.Finally, the woman completely loses all sense of stability and becomes mentally deranged. The narrator has had enough. Her feelings are finally able to escape. â€Å"I’ve gotten out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back† (Gilman 519)! John’s treatment and oppression have made the narrator completely insane. She has finally â€Å"gotten out† from John’s control. A new name emerges, Jane, which is the narrator. The narrator has pulled the wallp aper off and she cannot be put back up. The narrator believes it is a separate person but in fact, it is her. Jane† escaped the wallpaper just like the narrator escaped the control of John. In the final analysis, John comes home to see what has happened to his wife. The narrator writes; â€Å"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time† (519 Gilman)! This is by far the creepiest and most mysterious part of the story. John sees what she is doing and faints right into the path of her â€Å"creeping. † The narrator had to â€Å"creep† around the entire room, crawling against the wall over John’s lifeless body. And now, the narrator was in control.John could do absolutely nothing to stop her. She could do as she pleases. If you look closely, the words â€Å"every time† emphasize that John never awoke. He was dead as the psychotic narrator crept over him. He cou ld no longer control her ever again. As a final point, this text leaves the reader with many predictions and questions that cannot be completely answered. Gilman’s short story proves how a man’s control can affect one’s life forever. The oppression and mental abuse show the narrator’s difficulty living within this unequal climate. This story can put a little â€Å"creep† into anyone as it did with myself.