A Name

            My full name is Jesse Antonio Valdez. My first name, Jesse, isn't really important. I wasn't named after anyone, and it isn't a Latino name. It was just a name that my parents decided was a nice sounding name, so I got it. My middle name, on the other hand, is a Puerto Rican name that was given because my dad was Puerto Rican. He was also El Salvadorian, and his last name was Valdez which is El Salvadorian. So Puerto Rican for my middle name, and El Salvadorian for my last name. Funny how both my middle name and last name have some of my heritage in it, but my first name was chosen from one of those popular names books for parents, and has no Irish meaning. I think my mom originally wanted to give me an Irish name like Sean or something like that, but she and my dad ended up deciding Jesse. I am actually glad that I got that name, because Sean sounds too plain and "un-special", and I think Jesse has a little more meaning to it for some weird reason. I'm not sure if I prefer a more Latino name, like Jose or something, but I did get called Jose a few times before and it didn't sound that great. I look back at that now though and it sounds like a pretty good name.

The Color Purple Essay

The Color Purple Essay

In the epistolary novel “The Color Purple”, written by Alice Walker, the main character Celie and her sister Nettie are both very different people who go through very different experiences lthat include being abused by men, having to fight to protect themselves, and to reunite with each other after being separated. What should be taken into consideration, however, is that Celie often says she is ugly, whereas Nettie is said that she is pretty and smart. This information is vital because it provides evidence and my guess on why Celie and Nettie go though different experiences.

One of the ways that Celie and Nettie are different is when it comes to religion. Celie had a hard time believing in God due to her being raped, having her children taken away from her, and being constantly abused by her husband who she doesn’t even love. Later on, she decided to not believe in God at all because of these reasons and because God never helped her. In the end of the story though, Celie believes in God completely. One of these reasons is because Shug Avery talks to Celie about God. “She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that love you to death.”(p192) Shug teaches Celie that everyone, even her, has something to be grateful for. Celie decides to believe this and her faith and loyalty is rewarded by being able to leave Mr._____, opening a pants shop while living Shug and Squeak (Mary Agnes), and getting her children and Nettie back into her life. Her final letter is to God and about her thanking God for everything. It states, “Dear God. Dear stars, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything.” (p285) This proves that Celie finally believes in God and says that she is grateful for God giving her a better life and her children and sister back. Nettie is very different from Celie when it comes to religion. Nettie always believed in God no matter how hard life got for her, she prayed to God instead of not believing in him like Celie did. She might have gotten a better life than Celie because she believed, or she might have always had faith in God because she had a better life. It’s a chicken and the egg situation.

Another difference between Celie and Nettie is gender inequality. Refer back to the introduction paragraph that talks about Celie and Nettie possibly being treated differently and having different experiences because of their looks. This could be the key to how Celie and Nettie had different paths. If Nettie had been ugly in contrast to Celie, then he probably would have made Nettie marry Mr._______ and Celie would have stayed home with him. All Celie has ever know about husbands is that they abuse their wives and want them to do whatever they want, not what their wife wants. When Celie left Mr._____, she didn't normally like men or husbands. When Celie found out that Shug wanted to be with another man, she was extremely upset. "He's a man. I write on the paper. Yeah, she say. He is. And I know how you feel about men. But I don't feel that way." (p250) Another experience of gender inequality that Celie experienced was education and being successful. Some women got education and could even teach, but sometimes they weren’t allowed to or their parents didn’t see any necessity or good outcome or learning more, unless they were thought to become good teachers. An example of this is when Celie’s dad declines Celie’s plea to get more education. “You too dumb to keep going to school, Pa say.”(p9) Celie wanted to keep going to school, but since she might get married too Mr.______, her Pa didn’t see much use for Celie getting educated. Celie also was told that she couldn’t be successful and couldn’t amount to anything by Mr.______.
“You’ll be back, he say. Nothing up North for nobody like you. Shug got talent, he say. She can sing. She got spunk, he say. She can talk to anybody. Shug got looks, he say. She can stand up and be notice. But what you got? You ugly. You skinny. You shape funny. You too scared to open your mouth to people. All you fit to do in Memphis is be Shug’s maid.” (p205)

Nettie has experiences that are almost in complete contrast with Celie’s. She didn’t show and sexism or hateful thoughts towards men like Celie did. Throughout the book Celie hated men altogether. She had even nearly killed Mr.______ had Shug not stopped her. “Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss ‘em, as far as I’m concern frogs is what they stay” (p 254). She never made her peace with men until she saw that Mr.______ had changed and became a better person. Then she hugs Nettie’s husband, Samuel, which is a big deal for her considering what she went through and how she felt about men. Nettie however obviously didn’t have these same feelings for many reasons, or so her letters don’t say anything about it. When she visited Samuel and Corrine, she didn’t say anything about her having hostile feelings towards him. She knew who Mr.________ really was behind all the smiles he gave her and how he treated Celie, yet Nettie didn’t express or bear any of Celie’s same feelings. She appeared to have known not to judge and automatically assume men are all the same even most of the men she encountered were a certain way. She demonstrated this by marrying Samuel and even giving Mr.______ a hug, so either Nettie got all of Celie’s letters and knew Mr.________ had changed, or she wanted to see if he had by exemplifying forgiveness despite what he did.

In the book The Color Purple, Celie and Nettie both have different experiences on things like religion, gender inequality, and how these things affect their forgiveness. The only explanation for why Celie and Nettie are treated differently by men is because Celie is not very attractive, whereas Nettie is. Alice Walker probably writes this book to show how some women went through gender inequality and also how men treated them during this time period, and how some still do. In other words, Walker’s main point is to express what women went through and how hard it was for them in certain societies when they had no help. If it wasn’t for Shug, Celie probably would have still lived with Mr. _______. And not everyone has a Shug Avery in their lives to help them.

Rebutal to Tony's post on DNA alteration

       I decided to make a rebutal on Tony's thoughts about DNA altering. Here's the qoute.

Parents should not be allowed to change their children DNA because there would be insufficient resources, it is unsafe, goes against some religions, and would split the human race into super humans and humans.

       There's a few things I disagree with here. The first one is when Tony talks about DNA going against some religions. Religion is not very good evidence to go against changing DNA. I think that there are also some religions that would have no problem with altering DNA. So don't bring religion into debates unless you're arguing about something that concerns religion.
       Another thing is the superhuman thing. How would altering DNA mean that people would become super humans. Altering DNA would probably just include stuff on hair color, eye color,or other small things like that. I'm not sure that making changes in DNA would mean that humans would have super strength or other things like that. It would probably be just small things on the human body. So super humans would probably not exist unless DNA alteration was greatly advanced over a long period of time.
       I also don't know how this would lead to insufficient resources. It would still be one person, no matter how much their DNA is changed.So would they eat a lot more or something like that?

Writing Prompt

             Celie's letters to God say many things about her beliefs. For one thing, she never asks God for advice by saying "What should I do?" or How should I...", so maybe she lacks certainty about God and whether he exists or not. She might just feel like she needs someone to talk to. Kind of like how people have private journals and or private diaries. Maybe she doesn't believe in God that much, and she just uses his name in place of Diary or Journal or something like that.  If she wants to believe in him, then maybe Celie thinks that she will start believing him by saying "Dear God". She never says for (so far anyway) that she prays for a better life or that she prays to see Nettie or her child, or anything like that.

"Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me." (p. 1)

            Celie asks God for a sign to know what's happening to her. She might have asked for a sign for a different reason in her letter. Possibly the real reason she asked for God to give her a sign is to find out if he is real or not. She might want to believe, but might just be having a hard time believing. Though maybe writing things down like this is her way of praying and she writes better than she speaks.
           Or, my last theory on why she writes  her "Dear God" letters is because she wants someone to find them. Possible people are her sister Nettie, her husband Mr. ______, her father, or maybe someone else that turns up in the story that abused her, made her life hard, or played some sort of significance in her life. If one of these people found them, then they would feel remorse and if Celie had a child that she loved, then everyone else would take care of him or her to pay their respects to Celie. Whatever it is, she probably doesn't believe in God, however much she wants to. She probably believes in him at the end of the story, or believes in something because the dedication page is "To the Spirit".

Debate: Opening Statement; How can we avoid Terrorism?

            Terrorism is like a grudge. People sometimes carry grudges against old enemies. Nations sometimes carry grudges against other nations. Grudges lead to hate, hate leads to a want for revenge, a want for revenge leads to plotting it, and plotting it leads to carrying it out. This is the future of terrorism.
           Terrorism lead to the war in Iraq, and more terrorist attacks against other nations will lead to more wars. Then the world will be full of ruin, despair, poverty, violence, and fear. When that happens, there will be nothing left to fight over. Grudges will remain held with other nations and there will only be war.
          There's only one way to prevent this from happening. Peace must be made with other nations. I found a quote from a website called commondreams.org.

" If you want other people to be nonviolent, you first have to be nonviolent. Renounce every trace of violence in your heart and your life. Adopt the wisdom and practice of active nonviolence, as Gandhi and Dr. King taught. Beg the God of peace for the gift of peace. Join your local peace and justice group. Stand up publicly for an end to war. Let your life be disrupted, and take a new, nonviolent risk for disarmament. Create new cells of active nonviolence. Embrace the religious roots of nonviolence. Study and teach the wisdom of nonviolence. Resist your local military and government violence. Stop business as usual, government as usual, media as usual, war as usual and demand peace, justice, and disarmament for the whole world, now. Announce the vision of a new nonviolent world, a disarmed world, a world without war, poverty, injustice or nuclear weapons."               

          Real efforts have to be made. Not the "well we tried" efforts. Don't ask other nations for peace. Tell them that peace is going to happen, because the world will get pretty screwed up if we don't put aside the past and start over. Tell them that this is what were going to do to help, and this is how much we just want to live in a peaceful world. We need to actually help other nations with whatever they need. Give money to the poor places, water and food to the starving and thirsty places, and give medicine to the sick places.Make sure every nation and continent has what they need to survive. How will America pay for it? It turns out America can pay for a lot of stuff if they put their mind to it. Give away some food, water, materials for building, medicines, and whatever else that the U.S. has a surplus of. The other option is to keep saying "we tried" and just let terrorism happen and wait for it to turn into a World War 3. Let it happen even longer and a century from now we'll be in World War 7. That's why we need to stop making plans on how to defend ourselves from threats of terrorism and start making peace with other nations and people alike.
          

           I was looking at some recent posts made, and I saw something that I knew I could write a lot about in 14 minutes on Cristian's blog.

Sometimes it just hits me that we, humans, the animals that have an open consouis and can feel love are the same animals that can a drop a nuke and comit genocide on a people because religious sterotypes. We are the animals that can make industries like Pixar and the Red Cross, but yet, we can also judge someone based on thier skin color or have rich and poor. Well, I think we messed up, big time.

          I was just watching a movie called Food Inc. and when I saw this post, I had to respond. People do these things out of greed. They either want money so they can be rich, or money so they can stay rich. Anything goes to achieve that goal. Killing, scamming, stealing, everything. On that movie, it shows the founders of McDonald's. They make everyone do only one job like putting lettuce on or something like that, so they don't have to pay employees much. Then they use the rest of the money for more Mcdonald's places and more products.
         Another thing on that movie is that a lady with a son had three hamburgers, and in 2 weeks, he died. The lady pleaded his case, and went through all this stuff in more than 1 month to see the owner of the company. The kept making sure they never saw her or never met her, because if it got out they would lose their company that wasn't even doing well. On top of that 2 more kids died from their products with the same disease that came from the burgers. The company denied it.
       

        This is part of my quickwrite in Mr. Sutherland's class on spirits. I also added examples that I thought of in books and reality. I said that spirits are emotions like happiness, anger, revenge, and so on that can control you in a way, like impulses and choices on split-second decisions. I have many examples that they are true.           
          In the book Unwind, one character named Conner had some problems that he talks about. He would often get in fights for no reason at all because there would be too much noise. He would just turn around and beat someone up.
          Another example (though I'm not entirely sure it's a true example) is the main character from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Inn, Christopher. I didn't read the book, but from some of the discussions I heard, Chris couldn't control his emotions and didn't know how to deal with them. That could be because he has so many spirits in him and they are all happening at once, so that he doesn't know what to do.
          Possibly even some people who have anger-management issues have a lot of anger spirits in them. You could call those spirits demons I suppose, and maybe things like meditation or that whole take a deep breathe stuff tames them in a way. Maybe some people write in journals ore diaries because they can think about their thoughts and know how they really feel. Kind of like with siblings are angry at each other and say "I hate you", then they probably don't mean it. Saying that, like swearing and yelling and punching stuff, lets out anger. Also things like being distraught and not eating or doing things that keep you unhealthy are ways of the spirits that have sadness show emotion. That's all I can think right now. I might think of some other examples.