Arguing against “A 9/11 remembrance, overshadowed” - Scott Reilly

“A 9/11 remembrance, overshadowed” - Scott Reilly

I believe the 9/11 remembrance was not overshadowed this year and never will be. At Virginia Tech, the students were still asked to try and take a moment of silence during the day to remember the victims of the attack. When I logged on Facebook that day and scrolled through the newsfeed, I only read “Remember 9/11” and “God Bless America” statuses. An extravagant, organized remembrance ceremony doesn’t have to be conducted every year at every memorial in order to commemorate the tragedy and the victims. Annually, as a country we only have to remember the tragedy in our hearts and pray for the victims and their families on 9/11. Reilly claims that 9/11 was overshadowed this year because there was no ceremony at the community memorial in Rockville, Maryland. But 9/11 will never be overshadowed because that memorial will always stand in the park in Rockville for people to see and remember the tragedy every day.

Warning Signs

Ever since I was a little kid, I envisioned myself being a star athlete. After I joined the swim team at age 7, that vision grew stronger. I fell in love with swimming the minute I joined swim team. The other kids on the team were a lot of fun to be with and the older kids on the team were inspiring and as a youngster I wanted to be just like them. I continued to swim and loved the sport until about junior year in high school. The increased work load, more challenging courses and the pressure of college made me stressed the entire year. By the time I got to swim practice after school I couldn’t focus on the practice because I had school work on my mind. Soon, I realized I wasn’t improving because I wasn’t doing my best in practice due to the stress. Because of my desire to do well in school also, I began to not enjoy swimming as I once did. And the only reason I began going to practice was because I knew it was healthy and because I wanted to stay in shape. But I kept swimming anyway, despite my lack of heart, because I didn’t want the possibility of me becoming a star athlete to totally disappear. By senior year, swim practice almost felt like a chore. I went because I told myself, “I have to go, my teammates need me at practice and my coach will lecture me if I don’t.” As a senior I was contemplating swimming at a DIII university called Stevens because I still wanted my dream to come true. But I knew deep down that I wasn’t going to be happy and enjoy my 4 years at college if I did swim. But trusted my gut and made the decision to come to VT because I knew swimming just wasn’t for me anymore and I’m glad I did.

Family Dinner

It is Thanksgiving Day and the odd thing is, is that my mom is not home. My dad, sister and I are going to pick her up from the airport in a few hours. Usually on this holiday my family hosts a large crowd at my house for dinner, including my grandparents, aunt, uncle and two cousins. But this Thanksgiving it is different. My mom is coming home from China today. My mom is a patent lawyer and after a long, hard project that, to me, seemed to take a year, a trial in China was held. My mom was an essential part of this trial and had to be there. She was gone in China for about a week and a half and I was excited to pick her up because I missed her. By the time we picked up my mom it was about 7:30 at night, but we hadn’t had dinner yet. On the way home we stopped at McCormick and Schmick’s for our Thanksgiving dinner. The food was still good but it was nothing like my mom’s turkey and mashed potatoes. When my mom, dad, sister and I sat down at the white table-clothed table in the dark, not homey restaurant, I thought how truly blessed I am for my family. My mom was gone about a week and a half and my life was totally different during that time because my mom helps me a lot in my daily routine. There was no one to help me with my homework or make my lunch for school. All I could think about was that some kids don’t have parents and that I am so thankful for mine.

Pay attention

Today, I went to a music practice room in Squires to get myself back into piano after I took about 3 months off after my stressful senior recital at the end of the school year this past summer. I had to concentrate harder to play the music smoothly and playing wasn’t as natural as it was three months ago. Playing alone in a square room for no one is different than practicing at home for my family to listen to whether they want to or not. If someone asked what I had been doing for the past 45 minutes and I responded that I played the piano in a music room, they might think I was strange to sit alone. I’m not a music major, I’m not even taking a class in the department. So they might wonder why I just go to the practice rooms and play. The reason I do so is because I enjoy playing the piano; I do it for myself. It is an acquired talent that I worked hard at for 11 years and I don’t want to forget how to play. Because I didn’t have an audience while I was playing and I didn’t have a goal of a specific number of measure I needed to memorize for the day, I found myself day-dreaming. I thought about how I wasn’t doing my homework and how much I had to do that night and I thought about the Outdoor Club interest meeting I was about to attend after playing. But after I find myself day-dreaming for a minute while playing, I make my mind snap back to what it’s supposed to be doing and make myself pay attention to the piano.

Work

Everything that you put work into has an outcome or a beneficial result. For example, I can practice math every day and earn a 98% on the calculus test. But I could practice math every day and receive a 78% on the calculus test. These are both results but for the second calculus test, I received a grade that doesn’t seem so beneficial and I still didn’t practice math enough to perform at the highest standard on the test. I can work as a dentist from 9-5, 4 days a week and earn 106K per year. Or I could work as a factory from 7-9, 6 days a week and earn an hourly wage of $8. The factory worker works harder than the dentist but earns less income. But the dentist probably worked harder in school before he got his job than the factory worker, who might have not gone to college. The simplest example of work is when my body digests food, which takes work. My stomach churns and breaks down food to extract nutrients for energy to power by body. I use the energy I get from food to do work. These are all different ways work and results are completed.

Autobiography of Malcolm X vs. Superman and Me

Both Malcolm X and Sherman Alexie wrote Autobiography of Malcolm X and Superman and Me, respectively, for similar audiences. These stories are both directed at the white people that discriminated and degraded the colored people in the authors’ respective time periods. The white people believed colored people, both Native Americans and blacks, were stupid and could not be educated.  Malcolm X and Alexie directed their stories to similar audiences and likewise, their stories displayed similar purposes. Both Malcolm X and Alexie wrote their stories of how they became literate through self-education to refute and protest against the white people’s claim that colored people couldn’t be educated. While Malcolm X and Alexie’s stories have similar purposes and are directed at similar audiences, they wrote their stories with different voices. Malcolm X describes what he read in more detail than Alexie. For example, Malcolm X recites the events of Nat Turner’s rebellion and how the British white men took control of and colonized India, while Alexie only recites the genres he read. Malcolm X and Alexie also have a different tone behind their voices. Because Malcolm X recites all the diverse history he learned after he self-taught himself, one senses a boastful tone in his voice. In contrast, Alexie doesn’t recite all the interesting facts he learned from reading  in his story, which, compared to Malcolm X, doesn’t seem boastful. Alexie even says that he writes his stories in third person to make him and his personal achievement seem more modest. While Alexie and Malcolm X have similar purposes and audiences for their stories, they possess different voices in their writing.

Op-ed Review

In the article, Men, Who Needs Them?, the author, Greg Hampikian, informs his audience about the scientific breakthroughs of the possibility of a female becoming pregnant without a male. To do this, a “fresh or frozen” sperm from a “living or dead” donor is required.  But Hampikian uses this purpose to also make an underlying argument that the human population could technically continue without males with these breakthroughs and with the huge frozen sperm supply that could support the human population for generations. Hampikian’s intended audience is the everyday people that have an interest in science, but not the people rooted in the scientific community, as one may assume. This is because people very active in the scientific community would have probably heard about this advancement already or contributed to the research and development of this advancement themselves. This article is also not intended for the scientific community because the article was published in the New York Times, not a medical or science journal.  In the introduction, Hampikian has a serious tone because of the background information he dictates on the traits of the human and mammalian species. Later in the article, Hampikian’s tone can be seen as serious but underneath it is exaggerated. This is because Hampikian describes the process in detail of how a child is nourished only by a female from the child’s grandmother giving birth to the child’s mother to the mother giving birth to the child. In the description of the process, he mentions how little males contribute to child development compared to how much females scientifically contribute, both before and after the child’s birth. The article has an informative personality, yet a playful one since he tries to exaggerate how much females contribute to child development compared to males. There is also an unintended feminist personality because he states, “men [have] become less relevant to reproduction and parenting.”  The argument that the human population could technically survive without men due to the breakthroughs in science is effective and convincing because he uses scientific evidence and processes to support his claim. I believe that the article would convince the target audience, because the sociologists and the child development specialists in the scientific community that the article is not directed towards would disagree with Hampikian’s claim.

Hampikian, Greg. "Men, Who Needs Them?" New York Times 25 Aug. 2012: A19. New York Times. 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 30 Aug. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/men-who-needs-them.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>.