Mike Detmer

Burdens

I think some “albatrosses”, or burdens, we see today can be found in many places.  I know for me, the biggest burden i have is school. My parents, mostly my dad, always yell at me for not doing well enough in school and, even if i have an A, it needs to be higher.  This truly does frustrate me because I work hard to get relatively good grades and then my dad turns around and says you aren’t working hard enough.  I’m not sure if it’s like this for other people, but I always have a burden on me because of school.  Another one I can think of is terminally ill family member or friend.  Often times, it pains me to watch another go through a death in the family due to cancer or another disease.  We don’t know the pain they’ve been through, or what other tough decisions they had to make.  A choice they might have to make would be deciding if they want to pull the plug on the person or not, if they are in an extreme amount of pain, they are being kept alive by life support, and if they are going to die soon.  These are kind of like the “albatross” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner because he is stuck with bad luck and feels guilty all the time.  He is plagued with bad luck until he blesses the snakes he sees in the water, and then the “albatross” falls from his neck.  These are also related to “The Lorax” because the antagonist at the beginning cuts down all the trees and makes “Sneedes” and takes away the peoples home and place to play.  After he uses all the resources, he ends up living by himself until people by some sort of fee to hear the story.  After the story, the kid who paid for the story gets the last tree seed.  The said antagonist repents for what he has done.  Some things we can do in our daily action towards these burdens are to raise awareness for both of these issues.  If people just know about other peoples troubles at home about school work, or if the know about a terminally ill person, then they would most likely spread word around which would probably cause donations to be made to a certain disease, or more work would be done by the students to talk to the teachers about lightening the load a bit.  Some things Moeller can do in, and outside, of school are things that they are already doing.  Right now, we are raising money for Relay for Life, a non-profit organization raising money for cancer.  Last year alone, they raised at least 3 million dollars by fundraising.  We can continue to contribute to this number and raise the number of dollars each year.  We can also go around and visiting the sick and help them feel better and pray for them.  As for schoolwork, we can hold more study groups or make sure everyone in the class knows the material before we take a test.  

The Children’s Lost Childhood

I think, that we Americans, should respond in a more positive matter to the lost youth.  If we dont act out more and help, there is a chance that things could evolve into another act of total genocide, like Rwanda.  Children’s lives are not meant to be ruined at age 5 or 12.  We need to act up and send either troops or money or combine with the United Nations to bring equality back into these countries.  I dont think much could be done for the children when the revolution was beginning because it was seen as normal but now that we’ve established that is wrong and not normal, we should act out against it.  

Some effective ways to fight social injustices are to raise awareness of the situation at hand.  U4U has definitely done this right.  When we watched the video in class, it showed us the true horror that goes on in Uganda.  People get tortured, or even worse: killed, for not doing what they are told.  It demonstrates what the money we raise goes towards and it is really humbling to see what they have and how they make it through everyday and how we complain at the littlest things, like what we are going to wear tomorrow, or how we currently look today.  In reality, it doesnt matter. What matters is human life and how sacred it is.

Blakes ideas of innocence are: Genuine love and naïve trust toward all humankind, as well as: Unquestioned belief in Christian doctrine.  His ideas of Experience were: Profound disillusionment with human nature and society and One entering a state of “experience” sees cruelty and hypocrisy only too clearly but is unable to image a way out.  In all of his poems he provided an illustration to help the reader understand what he was trying to say.

We’ve gone too far.

The Industrial Revolution has had a direct impact on our world today.  I believe it has had a very negative impact, not a positive one.  It is currently destroying our economy and the way people act towards each other and towards the earth.  We are currently taking the world for granted, and that is not a good thing.  I was listening to Jack Johnson and one of his songs, Sleep Through the Static, really described the way we treat the earth perfectly.  In his song, he says “Who needs sleep when we’ve got love? Who needs keys when we’ve got clubs? Who needs please when we’ve got guns? Who needs peace when we’ve gone above. But beyond where we should have gone? We went beyond where we should have gone”.  I took this as we have gone so far that, instead of being friends and fine like the way people had lived before the revolution, that now we have to protect what we have and be so jealous of what other people have that we steal it.  It’s all about image and how people have to “keep up with the Jones’”.  People constantly buy new things, and throw away perfectly usable objects so they can be popular.  Also in the song, he says “who needs please when we’ve got guns?”  This means that even though we should just use the simple word “please” to solve conflicts we instead use guns which leads to warfare and death. 

Life is much more complicated today.  Today, we work to make money in order to pay for the essentials that we need to live and more. Pre-revolution, people worked to live.  They worked to make food so they could eat and survive.  In other words, Life was much simpler back then.  The Industrial Revolution just complicated things.

With the new revolution came extreme amounts of pollution.  As we, people of the earth, progress with technology and advanced technology, we are slowly destroying the earth by destroying our ozone.  All this is caused from pollution from cars, factories, new technology, etc.  We need to find away to reduce the pollution and going back to the ways before all the changes started happening. As inconvenient as that sounds, it is what we must do in order to extremely reduce pollution.  It would also save many lives.  

My ecological footprint is higher in Food and Housing Footprints.  I think this is because i eat a lot and and almost always hungry.  My family has four people who use a ton of energy in our house which is why our housing footprint is higher than average as well.  A way I can help reduce our footprint is to cut down on water usage in our house as well as starting a compost pile instead of using a garbage disposal.

Life was so much easier before the revolution, why did we have to complicate it so much?