Close Prompts: Against Gay Marriage

Before i begin, I would like to clarify that i'm all for gay marriage and i have nothing against loving the same gender but this article proved to be interesting and I figured maybe i'll practice reading and analyzing from another person's point of view and discarding my own. Like Ms. Holmes said, sometimes, you need to step into the author world and leave your opinion behind. So here is me leaving my opinion behind. 


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Recent television series and movies prove to support the expression of oneself, specifically on the topic of being openly gay. This movement that has slowly been gaining momentum since the 20th century where individualism became just as important as conformism in a communism society. However, little light has been shed on the other side of the argument and Eddie Thompson, in response, writes The Argument Against Gay Marriages to provide his reasons for not supporting the cause. Thompson writes Argument to answer all the questions that activists ask but are never answered to, finally coming to say that gay-marriage is only a struggle with deeper motives, bad for the well being of our society and looked down upon by God. 


The most noticeable trait that Thompson puts onto the table is the dehumanizing of the word "homosexual", "gay" and "lesbian". The most obvious example in contained in the first paragraph where Thompson hints at the fact that homosexuals are aiming for something more than equality, saying "there is a deeper agenda at work here..." and he further pushes human qualities away from the terms when he goes into deeper detail and yet refuses to give a proper name to any homosexual and consistently using these terms until it sounds like he is talking about a species of animals that are pinning against "the well-being of our society.".


Secondly, Thompson proves his point by first using very frank language, thus achieving a very straight to the point tone. From the very start, he does not beat around the bush nor does he subtly imply anything. Instead, he takes the subject head on and pulls the reader in with short, stabbing sentences like "gay and lesbians already possess rights equally protected under the law. They have the exact rights that I have today. They can marry a member of the opposite sex if they so choose, just like I have done. " By using sentences that are short and somewhat rhythmic, Thompson is able to establish a sort of trust with the reader, not with his facts, but the fact that he will be honest with his opinion.


Details also contribute to Thompson's matter of factly tone, as he spits out sentence after sentence and connects them like points on a graph. He first starts out with any specific detail,"gay lobby encourages behavior deemed unacceptable by every major religion" then follows with a string of other facts that lead to a single, finite conclusion, " The truth of the matter is marriage is a sacred union ordained by God, and nothing man does can ever really change that." The details work not only to support his opinion but also to reinforce the trust established by Thompson.

These all work together to prove Thompson's point; that homosexuals should not have the right to marriage because they are already equal to another being and that any changes made by humanity towards the subject would not be successful.

Response to Course Material: Ceremony

Ah.

I liked Ceremony a whole lot better than DOS or TAD, but reading it the first time around was really confusing and i had to resist the urge to Sparksnotes some things that i didn't understand. In Ceremony, i felt like i was being tugged from one TV channel to another where nothing makes much sense because its all jumbled together.

But i get it now. Thats just Ceremony's nature, that sort of 'you'll understand it later' deal. Everything sort of makes sense and i look forward to talking to my peers about it in class. Which is a much better feeling than the 'i-want-to-slam-this-freakin-book-down-dude-stop-puking-why-r-u-banging-Night-Swan-wtf-is-up-with-the-mountainlion-its-symbolic-but-how?-omg-thank-the-Lord-I'm-done.' feeling i had the previous week.

I feel like i have an emotional connection to Tayo because I've gone through similar things he has, to a much lesser extent, being Asian raised in white culture, i struggle with the same struggle he goes through. Its like...where is that happy median between your roots and the environment that you live in? Theres not one, you've just gotta make one thats right for you. At the same time, i wish he'd grow himself a pair stop trying to run or give up. He's very emotional for a guy (I just typed 'gay', Freudian slip much? haha) and it sometimes annoys me at how impulsive he is. But hey, you're not gonna like everyone in life.

Also, the rate at which 5th hr annotates as a class is almost alarming because we just have to explore every end thread of every detail and there's so many varying opinions. Since i have no words to describe how much it gets on my nerves, i shall replace it with this image:

But I guess its better than running past any important info, right? Overall, a good week, the moving of the annotation due date made my day. Good night all. :)

Open Prompt: That's What She Said

Here's my first go at analyzing Ceremony before the entire class has discussed it.

2010. Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience. Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Alienation and exile can be a frightening experience that allows for character development in both the real and literary world; a scared new student put into a new high school may be shy at first but can overcome that fear and develop a new confidence in himself.  Likewise, the character Tayo in Ceremony by Leslie Silko feels estranged from Native American culture because he is part Indian and part white. Coming home from the trauma of World War II, after losing his brother figure, Rocky, Tayo realizes the rift in himself and struggles to put those two parts of him together.

Tayo's internal strife that the novel centers around comes from his surroundings yet starts in his roots. His mother is a prostitute and his father was a drunk that disappeared before he was born and by the age of four, his mother abandons him with his uncle, Josiah and menacing aunt, simply called 'Auntie'. While Josiah does his best to incorporate him into the family, Auntie distances him from her son, Rocky, and herself, hating the fact that he is half white. This is his first conscious experience of being alienated from his culture, as he recalls the silent truth between him and Auntie as a child, an unwritten code that Rocky would be favored and he would not be noticed. The alienation grows even further as Tayo comes back from World War II, where he experiences the pleasures of being an American. Tayo comes to the epiphany that it was not him that the girls and booze was serving, but simply the uniform that he wore. Now, Tayo has no where to turn, his brother figure, Rocky has died during war and as he was away, Josiah had also died. Being half Indian, Auntie refuses to accept him and without his uniform, he is nothing to whites. 

Eventually, Tayo does find a way to heal the two parts of him; by doing a ceremony. While there are no specific instructions other than being told that the ceremony changes to accommodate with the times, Tayo finds  a way to bridge the gap in himself through a series of events. The series of events, objects and people are meant to allow him accept certain things in his life that he has not and embrace a part of himself. He falls in love with Ts'eh, also known as Montano, symbolizing his love for the wild and clues him in on the fact that the ceremony actually exists. Once he begins to believe in it, animals also begin to appear to help him, making Tayo acknowledge the fact that he also has a deep belief in the mythical teachings that whites disdain. By the end of the summer, he is able to return the missing cattle that Josiah had bought; thus letting Auntie accept him into the family. Finally, he completes the ceremony by watching the death of his friend, Harley, accepting that life completes itself in a circle and death is the end of it. By the end of the novel, Tayo is able to return home, accepted into his family and community, completed and whole.

The rift that Tayo has between himself is important to the novel because it comes to symbolize the many things that Silko is trying to say; its not just a division of Tayo but also representative of the rift between of two cultures as well as the different generations in Native American culture. Having Tayo complete the ceremony, Silko proves her point that there are problems created by the intrusion of American culture but it can be eventually cured.

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My right wrists hurts so bad because i was typing so fast.  : D