America is essentially naive. We take what we want and we take what we have for granted. If something is going to propel our status up, whether it's for wealth, our social lives, or just out of selfishness, we don't seem to even hesitate to act. As we observe in Raymo's piece, the act of selfishness and naiveté is what drives their decisions, and eventually, will lead to their own death. The piece takes place in 1987, which is only around 25 years from when we learned how harmful cigarettes actually were. Just like in Raymo's piece when the six-year-old girl "rubbed the glowing dust on her body" not knowing that the "beautiful dust" would "damage her living cells" (Raymo 212) and kill her, our society did something quite similar and acted out of same naiveté. We did the same thing with tobacco and cigarettes and blindly rushed into using them because "they were cool" and "the new thing". Then once it was already too late and much of society was hooked on tobacco, we discovered the grueling side effects that came with it-death, cancer, tumors, and much much more. Unfortunately, in our society, almost all of our decisions are made out of our selfishness and these ultimately lead to death and disaster. However even when the consequences hit us and we realize our wrongs, we still continue to make these naive decisions because we just can't help ourselves and we allow ourselves to believe that we NEED more. Overall, I believe that Raymo's piece serves as eye-opener to display to the readers that we need to learn from our mistakes because if we don't, we just get stuck in a never ending cycle of consequences and down falls.
Poetry- the unit that most students dread to learn about in their English class. But why is poetry so disliked among high school students? A few of these reasons, and that I can attest for personally, are that poetry is seen as old, it can be quite difficult to understand/interpret, and we just fail to see the point of it. However, after interpreting some poems in class, my perspective began to shift (only slightly not significantly though). While I am still not the biggest fan of poetry, I am beginning to see a different side to it. Yes, poetry is all of the negative things that I stated above (at least in my opinion) but once poetry is understood, the lesson becomes that much clearer and applicable. Understanding and correctly interpreting poetry is not only a beneficial skill to have but it also opens your eyes to a deeper understanding to things that are important in terms of culture, history, and etc. For example, poetry has effectively been used to advocate and teach about i...
Is your first sentence alluding to toilet paper?
ReplyDeleteI really like how you used Raymo’s piece to refer to how naive we are. I agree that we see what’s “cool” and partake in it and think it won’t do us no harm but our lack of knowledge eventually gets the best of us.
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