Vinny Genovesi
English 1010
11/1/14

Like Sand Through the Hourglass...

 English 1010 has been a really great class for me. I've been out of school for a long time
so it's been a while since anybody challenged me to stretch my legs and try writing some things that I normally wouldn't normally write. One of my favorite assignments was the Thomas Kincaid description that we did after listening to Monkey Garden. I liked describing the same thing in two different styles and I enjoyed the freewrite-to-final-draft place description that we did after that. It was a good chance for me to play around with adjectives, which is something I haven't done in a long time. I also liked the group picture activity. Writing as a group was a very different experience. I'd love to do something more involved with that one day. And, of course, the personal narrative was a lot of fun to do. My favorite part about that one was the process.Selecting a picture, trying to come up with a good narrative for that picture, then doing first draft to peer review, to revision, to final draft was really enjoyable.

 The response essay has, so far, been the most interesting assignment for me in this class.
One of the biggest problems that I had in writing it, was that the first time I read through the original essay, it actually had me somewhat convinced. Here's this essay about how we shouldn't help the poor and we should protect and defend resources within certain borders, and my ultra-liberal self is sitting here nodding along, saying "Yeah! Let's keep those brown people out of America so that my kids' kids can be just as spoiled as I am!" That's the power of persuasive writing, I guess. Overcoming that was pretty simple. It was just a matter of refocusing on the overall tone and rhetorical style of the writer, rather than paying attention to specific facts and figures. There's this great line in The Simpsons where Homer says "Facts? Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything." Funny, but soul-crushingly true.

 The reason that I enjoyed doing the response so much is because I love picking apart
nonsense, and that's something I'd forgotten in the time that I've been out of school. As I stated above, the original essay was well-written enough that on my first read-through I did actually question a few of the things that I originally believed. I found myself wondering if there was a case to be made for all of the Fox News "We built this" (remember that?) nonsense. Is there validity in nationalism and selfishness and hoarding of resources? But I took myself out of it and I took a step back and I thought about what it is that we're really talking about here, and all I could think was that these are human beings that we're talking about as statistics. It's a cliche statement, but it's a true one. It's funny how quickly you can dehumanize an entire race, or a continent, or, in this case, about 66% of the planet, just by transforming them into numbers. So I did feel my own ideals being challenged, both in reading this essay, and in writing a response to it, but I also found them more solidified by the experience.

 When I wrote my response to Garret Hardin, the audience that I had in mind was
essentially myself. I was thinking about another person who was just like me reading this essay for the first time. When I first read it, I actually posted it on my Facebook wall because I was curious what other people thought of it. It seemed pretty airtight to me and I wanted to know where some holes could be poked. So when I wrote my response, I wrote it with myself and those people who read it in mind. I thought of myself wanting to someone to poke a few holes and I thought about where would be most satisfying to do it and I began at that point.

 I feel like my tone may have been a little sterner than it ought to be for this kind of paper,
but it honestly irritated me and I couldn't help dropping some sass in there. I tried for a very ethically-based response. The best way that I could see to counter a stone-cold fact-dropper, is through an appeal to ethical responsibility. I didn't feel like an appeal to emotion would stand up to such calm reason. Appeals to emotion rarely do stand up to reason; they usually end up looking manipulative or cheesy. In my opinion, though, social justice trumps all. You can sit here and throw numbers all day, but if I tell you that you have a duty to your fellow human that supercedes all logic, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who'd disagree. They wouldn't do it publicly anyway.