Author: BowenD

In Robert Cormier’s short story “The Mustache”, the main character, Mike, who was 17 years old wanted to look and act like an adult. He grew a mustache so he could seem like a adult even though he was only 17. The story shows what Mike is concerned about in his day to day life, but each problem concerns him even more. His first problem was paying more for movie ticket, the second problem was wether his grandmother still remembered him or not, and lastly his grandmother thought that he was her husband. But why does this matter? Isn’t these problems normal? Every time you grow other, you will carry more and more responsibility as a adult. Mike, who wanted so desperately to become somebody mature, doesn’t realize he responsibilities. This story tells us that the more older we get, the more responsibilities we will carry and we shouldn’t disregard our problems in life.

First of all, life is full of twists and turns. You wouldn’t expect an accident when it happens. When your small, most likely you won’t have a family to feed as one of your problems. The most distressing problems you might have is doing your homework on time or passing a test. However, when you grow up to be an adult, it would be like cold water hitting your warm, comfy position in life. Now, passing a test is least of your worries. Will I get a job? Can I pay off this year’s rent? Am I going to lose my job? These are only some problems that adults have to deal with, and obviously is more stressing. Lots of people want to run away from their problems in life and try to ignore the fact that they are failing or having a bad life. This is a problem you will see hundreds, maybe thousands of times in your life. However, you should never run away from your fears or problems. The fear and problems you have will always be at your side, your merely just ignoring it. You need to be mature and face your problems in your life so you could actually move on.

Lastly, you shouldn’t fake trying to be mature. Faking maturity will bring you lots of problems in life, especially problems that you can’t deal with at your age. Take Mike for example, when his grandma thought that he was his late husband, Mike had to answer things that he knew nothing off and was obviously scared. Mike wanted to be a adult, he wanted to be more mature, yet he couldn’t face problems like these in his daily life. Somebody that fakes maturity will get problems they are not yet ready to deal with. The reason that your parents and those around you are constantly helping you get a good start at life is because they want you to grow up and face your problems with a calm mind. Trying to be more of an adult then you are, will bring up lots of problems that you wouldn’t be ready to deal with, and will often make you regret your choices.

In conclusion, dealing with your problems in life can be hard and seem impossible, but we have to deal with it, or else the problems that haunts us will never go away. We have to realize that being an adult isn’t something to be playing around us. Having an adult life will get you in adult problems that our parents and those around us face everyday. It’s better to just be who you are and enjoy the responsibilities you have today.

In William Faulkner’s short story “Uncle Willy”, he reminds us that our behavior will have an influence around others, shown when Uncle Willy isn’t exactly the responsible and righteous guy. However he’s nice and caring, portrayed when he always gives a prize to the winning team in his town’s baseball match. There’s nothing wrong with Uncle Willy, he is nice and fun, but he also lives an unhealthy life style and is really irresponsible. Our every actions are an influence to those around us and if we have a bad behavior, everybody, especially the young, will copy you. This leads to other people having a bad behavior and is a really horrible domino effect. We need to be aware of our actions and be responsible for what we do in our lives.

First of all, most of us have seen people smoke before. These kind of people in our society is growing by numbers day by day. Even though we have scientific evidence smoking is bad for you, why do people still do it? One person might smoke and convince his or her friend that smoking is fine. His or her friend might try and since smoking is addicting, then most likely the friend will be convinced. However social media is constantly portraying these bad behavior as something trendy, so other people will start to do it. One person’s action might affect thousands around them and if the reaction is bad, then this wound will not heal quickly. Not being responsible for our actions and thinking about the people around you will cause a bad domino effect in your community.

Secondly, people constantly say that parents should be a good example of a human being to their children. However, a child could learn from basically anyone and so if the child learns something bad, then the child most likely have a tendency to act it out.. The young will learn from our actions during our daily lives. The people around us will affect our growth, and if the people around us is giving off bad examples, then it will influence other people to do wrong. We need to be good examples for our younger generations.

Last, I want to address the problem of lying and scandals in our day to day lives. Lying on social media is really common, especially in our age. But humans can’t be born evil so why do we see a uprising of lies on news and online? It’s because of the internets influence. I’m not saying the internet is bad for us, I’m saying that the internet is really free, so anyone could post anything on the internet. Posting normal things like entertainment or blogs about vacation is good, it lets us obtain new knowledge about the world. However, the people that post fake news to cause distress and harm in our society is not just posting something fake; that person is causing others to realize “We can post fake things like that and nobody will ever know!” This is bad influence to others by one individual or group to spread lies and hate throughout a normal community. Even online, people can still be affected by irresponsible behavior.

All in all, William Faulkner’s “Uncle Willy” teaches us an important lesson ; to mind our actions and be aware that other people will be influenced by us, especially the younger generations. We need to take action and make it so we don’t have to worry about our community getting ruined or for other people to be unsuccessful. Hopefully we all can be responsible and set a good example for the people around us.

Science is a great thing that we have produced and advanced in. It gave humanity improvements and also improved our knowledge of those around us. Science, to us, is a blessing and a whole new world. However, what if science, which gave us power and knowledge, instead doomed us all and destroyed humanity? It isn’t impossible, since in Ray Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder” humanity changed because time travelled and changed the past. But what if we were to develop the kind of technology that lets us travel the past or stop time itself? What would happen? Science is a really helpful tool to humanity, but we also need to be weary of it, or else it could be our downfall.

Many of you have heard of time traveling and most of you would probably agree that it is useful. We could stop important people from getting hurt, change our future, and stop the extinction of a kind of animal. But time traveling is also really risky. If you change one small thing, like leaving the lights on or throw a twig at a dog, then the future might change entirely. This one small action could create a big ripple in time, thus being known as the “Ripple Effect”. In “Sound of Thunder”, the ripple effect is portrayed when the protagonist accidentally killed a butterfly from the prehistoric age. When he travelled to present time, a complete nation and language changed, just because of this one stone thrown in the pond of time. This ripple effect would be a very bad side effect that could cause the downside of humanity.

Another dangerous thing is science not doing its job. If somebody was to make a robot that does surgery, then the robot would be handling somebody’s life. A person’s life would be at stake, and if the robot was to fail its mission, than the person would die. Well, robots are more efficient than humans so the risk should be the same or less right? Well, thats wrong because even if a robot is more precise and quick, robots lack experience and emotion. Humans differentiate from robots because of this. Humans could make ethically right actions, while robots only do what it is supposed to do. If a military robot was to wipe out a whole army, there will be no lives at stake. But if wiping out the whole army involves destroying a whole town, humans would probably think twice before blasting. But robots wouldn’t since its main and only objective is to destroy the enemy. Thousands of innocent lives would be at stake.

Lastly, is a kind of technology that is very dangerous. Stopping time. Sure, stopping time could help in lots of situations and would be really handy, however, stopping time would mean that time would be frozen everywhere. Throughout the whole universe, time will be stopped. But time has stopped so if you were to move, that would be impossible. If that time-stopper had a red button on it and you just pressed it, then you can’t unstop time again! Time would be forever stopped, and nothing will happen again. But what if you were to be able to move when you stop time. Changing one small thing, like the ripple effect would cause a big disturbance. This concept of manipulating time and space is very risky and it wouldn’t be like exploring a whole new world. Instead, it will be like exploring a dungeon full of traps when we are blindfolded. We don’t know what to be cautious of and we don’t know solutions to problems that has never happened before.

Overall, science is a really risky tool that humanity has, but it has proved itself useful many times throughout the course of history. It let us explore things that were dreamed of by humans, and let us advance civilization at a speed that has never been shown before. However science isn’t to mess around with and could come with huge consequences if played around with. We need to be weary of what we do with science and we need to be cautious.

There are so much books and movies that talk about colonizing Mars, most of them are labeled fiction. However imagine a world where we are able to make the fiction today, become non-fiction tomorrow. Colonizing Mars might sound impossible, after all Mars is millions of miles away from us. However, scientists think that humanity actually has a chance to live on Mars. However, it will be really hard and even if we manage to ship millions to Mars, here will be even more problems than just oxygen and food.

First of all, shipping millions to Mars will take a lot of the Earth’s recourses and we can barely send 10 people to space. However, if the world was to get together and build many spaceships or just a couple massive ones, then sending a whole nation to space might be possible. But how much time will that take? Of course a long time, since you will be traveling millions of miles! Being patient would be a problem, but also food and water. How will you feed a whole nation while on a spaceship? Will you bring dirt and water to water plants? But then how about the water? Will you suck the water from nearby asteroids? It is all very complicated and we don’t have nearly enough knowledge on technology to be able to accomplish such feats. But in the future, we will definitely come up with an idea to solve this.

Second, if we get on Mars, then how will we split the territory. If Russia and America was to live separately, then how will we split who lives where? This Colonization will be a global project, so there will definitely be global conflicts. Additionally, Mars is not the same size as Earth so it wouldn’t be easy to take a Earth map and swap it into a Mars map. Even if we sort out all the territory problems, how will we distribute livestock and water? Mars has ice on it, thus we can make seas and lakes, but how will we distribute the water? Will it be like before, America having plenty of clean water while other places might not?

Lastly, a major problem would be travel. The world basically relies on travel to distribute goods. How will all the food be shipped? Since Mars’ gravity is 62% lower than Earth’s gravity then “air”planes and cars would cause mayhem. How will people travel around to get groceries or company’s ship products? This will be very hard to figure out, and again, will require serious upgrades to the technology we have now.

Overall, colonizing Mars right now will be unrealistic, but with enough knowledge and improvements to technology, we will be able to go to Mars and live on it. This idea has been a sci-fi plot for decades, but soon, we will be able to make our dreams become reality.

In the story “The Lady, or the Tiger?” written by Frank R. Stockton, it shows a cruel and somewhat unfair justice system. The accused person would be forced to choose one of the 2 rooms brought in front of him, one with a tiger who would eat him alive, and one with a bride whom the person has to marry. This justice system was really unfair and not only can criminals escape while innocents get killed, but even more like relationships, social status and the well-being of the people could get affected.

First of all, the person who has to choose will either die or marry somebody that they might not necessarily like. However in this trial, an innocent who didn’t commit a crime could end up choosing the tiger, which will lead him to his demise. But a criminal that killed or stole could choose the bride and stay alive. This justice system is based purely on luck and is shouldn’t be referred as a “justice” system, but rather a game of chance that revolves around death and life. This would make many things in society unbalanced and if this “justice” system shall be continued in this land there will be a imbalance of the innocent and the criminals.

Second, if a young person about 19 to 24 was to be in a relationship, but got accused then there will be 2 possibilities. The person might die, or be forced into marriage. The dying part will be simple, he would just die, but if he was to be married, the relationship he had before would basically completely get ruined. This causes conflicts and isn’t really healthy for a good society. Imagine that groups split up just because their sons and daughters weren’t able to marry and hate will stir up. This society would be a mess!

Lastly, the social status of individuals would be messed up. If a peasant or laborer was to marry a high class women, than his status would go up. Even thought this might sound good, it honestly isn’t. If the lower class has to die or marry (which brings them to higher class), then there will be no lower class. That will cause a great disturbance in society, economy and money wouldn’t have the same worth and different jobs will not be maintained. Who would do the labor or handle the farms? The higher class will never do that but, there is no lower class. Everything will be in mayhem and a whole empire will fall, just because of an absurd system.

All in all, the justice system which is shown in “The Lady, or The Tiger” is really absurd and has many downsides other than injustice. I hope to never see this kind of system in our society today and hope that i never will. We learn from this system that justice and rights for the people should be dealt fairly and handled with caution.

In the article “If We’re Not Careful, Tech Could Hurt the Fight against COVID-19”, it talked about about how using tech to fight the coronavirus could actually do the opposite of good. There are a lot of good reasons but one that stands out to me the most is wether the item would do what its supposed to do. We’ve seen many movies about how robots take over the world or robots cause a ruckus and “dysfunction”. But this problem isn’t only about wether we should let technology handle Covid-19, but it also applies to the future too. Should we let robots do surgery, test our health, do our checkup, clean or teeth, on and on. You might think that robots could do things more quicker, efficiently, and accurately, but what about that slim chance that it makes a mistake. What if the mistake happens while somebody’s life is on the line. Should we trust the technology to do such an essential task that many have to practice hours, days, years to perfect.

First of all, we have something that robots don’t have; emotion. Emotion and our humanely thinking can do a lot in many different situations. One example is in war. If you want a group of humans to defeat a fleet of enemy soldiers. The only problem is that there’s a town right next to it, so if you defeat the troopers, the town will go down as well. A human would probably think twice before destroying thousands, but a robot who doesn’t care about human lives, will destroy thousands. Why? Because its main and only objective is to defeat the troopers. It won’t think about how much people died in the attack or the loss, it will only think about its mission and mission solely. Robots will sacrifice lives to complete its mission, while humans will do something, trying to minimize damage.

Second, what would the people that get substitute by the robots do? Many would go jobless and soon poverty will wash over America and other places that rely on robots. If a robot could do surgery or make things then what are humans for, what are jobs for. People will lose jobs and soon, there will be a great difference between the rich and the poor. Economy would go haywire, the stock market will probably crash and the whole financial world will be in despair.

Lastly, technology is much too defective. These days the internet and technology is not necessarily stable. There are many hackers out there willing to sabotage everything they come across of. At the least a minor company’s shipment of their product could stop, and the very most, a important person’s treatment or surgery could defect and instead kill. Technology has proved itself defective and harmful many times in history sometimes small, other times devastating.

Technology over all is a very useful tool that us humans have and it has many pros and cons. While the cons might look scarier than the pros, scientists and engineers today are constantly trying to improve technology. Technology might not be too reliable today, but in the future it might just be reliable. For now, we need to be weary about technology’s cons, but enjoy the pros that it carries as well.

James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is about the protagonist, Walter Mitty and a day in his life. In this story we find out that after almost every action he does in his day to day life, he will suddenly daydream. His daydreams mostly focus on him being the leader and war hero. His dreams also portrays him as a innocent who died of a noble or injustice cause. Unfortunately the stories you hear from Walter’s dreams is exactly what’s not happening in Walter’s life. Walter is a very timid man and is definitely not a war hero, leader, or a innocent thats been wronged. He’s just a normal man with a normal job but with a huge imagination. In my opinion, I feel like he shouldn’t be daydreaming, since this wouldn’t get anybody anywhere. If he really wants to become somebody important or famous, he should really work towards it and actually do it.

First of all, if Walter daydreams everyday and he desperately wants to be somebody important and noticable, but instead he can’t, so he daydreams. That is a big flaw and Walter should instead, be working towards his goal. By daydreaming and just hoping one of his daydreams will become real is a waste of time and “effort”. Its like waiting to ace a final exam without actually studying and working. Walter Mitty is doing basically just that, hoping he could be famous by waiting. The future isn’t going to wait or stop for you. It will keep going and sooner or later you will have no future in your path. You have to make your actions quick and if Walter really wants fame and power, he should be working everyday for his fame and wealth, he should be trying to get promoted in his job, raise money to become somebody he dreamt off. Right now, he’s just wasting his life away.

Walter Mitty’s life has no problems, he’s perfectly fine and has a decent life, but Walter wants to be famous. There’s no problem in wanting to be famous, but he’s doing literally nothing. He isn’t trying to get fame, he’s not trying to do anything to acheive his goals. Instead he’s just dreaming and hoping. Hope and dreams aren’t going to get a person anywhere, you need to work for your greatness yourself. You can’t rely on gods or somebody else to get you what you want. You need to be a self-starter and work hard for your success. Never sit there and wish, go out to the world and announce your wish, and make your wish come true.

The story “A Modest Proposal” is a about a proposal to solve poverty in Ireland. Jonathan Swift, the writer, claims that selling and eating kids could make it so the parents will earn money and people wouldn’t need to use livestock as food, instead selling beef to earn money. He claims this idea could make it so there will be no poverty in England and the economy would rise as well as population. However, I think this would be the opposite of proactive and is very inhuman.

I feel like this proposal has many flaws in a logical sense and in a ethical sense. He claims that there will be no poverty and poverty is not easily solved. Most likely there will be more poverty because meat sellers might not have enough meat to sell due to the uprising nourishment of children’s meat. At first this might sound it would work, but this idea is just very inhuman and absurd. Do you want to eat somebody’s child for dinner? Or what about your own child? See, normal human beings wouldn’t want that especially since many people sees that as cannibalism, which is illegal in most parts of the world. To kill and eat children just to solve a problem that cannot be solved depends too much on luck and is way to disgusting. But what about population rising? Well he also says that specific people could produce more children that will stay alive, but how long until kids like those stay unaware of their surroundings. Sooner or later the children will know that their friends or siblings are being eaten and how will that damage them psychologically? I can’t even imagine.

Additionally, you, eating children would mean that your eating away at your own population, which is pretty ironic for a solution trying to raise the population. I also don’t agree with the writer because he’s not only said that children should be eaten, but he “wouldn’t mind” if high class women are eaten too. This statement is really bold and I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to jail for saying that in public. His idea of a good society is what he explained in his proposal, a society that eats its own people and treats its own people as mere livestock. Can you bear to live in a society that does just that? To “raise” the population and “solve” poverty? No, I would certainly not do that and I advise you to think so too.

This “modest” proposal of his is nowhere humble and is really absurd. I hope you will agree with me on this, but I still admire about how he dare propose this as an actual solution. Poverty is a global problem that is really devastating. But would you rather keep poverty, or eat your own children for food? I would say no to eating our offsprings and no, to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal.

In the story “Everyday Use”, there lives a family; Dee, Maggie and their mother. During a flashback in the story, it mentioned how their family saved up all their money just to get Dee education. Dee got the education and soon went to college, but with Maggie and their mother in poverty. When Dee came back from college, she starts to act differently. She treated the possessions of her family like mere tools and items, when in reality when she says its her culture and tradition, but really, she’s not appreciating it as her culture and tradition. In this story later on she shows that she’s really spoiled and takes everything for granted. All that money Maggie and her mother saved up was for her, yet she thought it was done by her hard work and effort. She even thought that Maggie and her mother was living in a bad way and she was even ashamed that her family was in such a bad situation. Not because of her sympathy, but because of her pride, she thinks she is superior. She isn’t even grateful for all the sacrifices her family made to get her into school.

In this story I learned that we shouldn’t take education, having good technology and clean food or water for granted. Many people on this planet are suffering because they don’t have the things we have. We might look around us and say “everybody has these things” but in reality, millions of people don’t. We’re just fortunate enough to have good housing, food, water, technology and countless other things. Most people will take these things for granted and would think they will always have these things, some people were born poor, some people were born rich. But that is not the case, it is only by our awareness of our surroundings will we ever get to a high social status or at least have a good life. In this story, Maggie thinks that getting into school and college was only because she was smart and she worked hard, not because her family raised enough money to get her into a school. She not only ignores that, but she is also ashamed that her family is so poor. If her family didn’t get her into school, they will have the money, they will be in a better situation but because her family loved her and cared for her, they sacrificed a lot to get her a good education. Dee pays back with disrespect and ungratefulness. We need to realize that not everything is because of our work, we need to realize that many people sacrifice time and money for us to get good education, good food, clean water and many more. Our ignorance is what makes us ungrateful and unaware of other people’s help and sacrifices in our lives.

Being selfish is a big problem we have everyday. We don’t realize other people’s help or we just choose to ignore it. We need to change that and be grateful for our well-being, grateful for everyday that we have what we have. Even something really small could be the cause of somebody’s love and caring attitude towards you. We need To learn and be grateful for what we have with us today.

Many people would think that being successful is hard. They are right, but a successful person isn’t because they are just born that way, its because they work hard, they concentrate and many other good traits to have.

Having a good behavior would take lots of time to get used to, especially if the behavior is something you never done. However it is not impossible and with determination and responsibility you will be able to get used to a successful life style. Working like hell is something that almost everybody wants and tries to do but often fails. Working and working hard is something almost completely different, by working hard, you need to focus on being as efficient as possible, completing your work quickly and well. Next is seeking criticism, which not a lot of people like. Criticism would be saying our work isn’t perfect, it isn’t good. But thats just ok because all of us are humans and having room for improvement is always good for us. If we are all perfect then there wouldn’t be any purpose for us. Never hate criticism because it will always be there. Instead you should take advantage of it and work to fix your mistake and “delete” that criticism from your life. Finally, it would be thinking outside of the box. Don’t go along with what everybody is thinking, or else you will never stand out and never learn. Thinking outside the box could also help you come up with faster and new solutions to a problem you’re facing. If you never think smartly, you will always be a normal person, part of the majority of society.

Being successful is really important, especially these days. We need successful and smart people in our lives not being successful ourselves but also around us. Take what we have now, a pandemic. If we didn’t have good doctors and hard working nurses, we wouldn’t be able to survive thought this pandemic. Everyday over 200 people relies on these successful people you see in TV and news. Don’t wait for other people to change the world and help society, you need to try to change the world yourself. Everybody hates extra work, but its just a matter of time where the only human beings that advances civilization is 1% of the people around us.

Being successful is hard and sweat, but with enough determination and courage to be unique, you will be able to be a successful person. Our society is lacking those who work hard, those who are creative and those want people to criticize so they can improve. In reality we need these kinds of people in our lives so we can progress in life. Being successful will be hard, but you will earn something greater in return.