Thursday, January 30, 2020

Black man and white women Essay Example for Free

Black man and white women Essay The story Black Man and White Women in Dark Green Rowboat†, written by Russell Banks, is about an interracial relationship on the brink of disaster. The story opens up on an extremely hot day in August at a trailer park that is right next to a lake with a variety of people who live there. I was not immediately aware that the black man and the white woman were the focus of the story, but those characters gradually emerged and that’s when things started to get interesting. It becomes very obvious that white women want to control everything in the relationship and doesn’t view the black man as an equal partner. Before they meet at the beach, the white women walks up in her bikini holding her towel, fashion magazine, and tanning lotion with her blonde hair swinging side to side. I automatically start to view her as an egotistical person. When the white women encounters the black man at the beach, she helps him push the boat to the water, but instead of helping him push the boat all the way from shore, she hops in it before her feet had even got wet. He was left to not only push the boat himself, rolling his pant legs up, but also pushing her in it as well. While he is rowing the boat he realizes he didn’t bring a hat and he is sweating. He wraps his shirt around his head and she explains to him that he looks like a sheik and a galley slave. To me this shows how she thinks of him as her own romanticized slave that she can control. She even reassures him that she was not kidding by saying â€Å"no really. Honestly†. (68). The man continues to row and she says she’s starting to put on weight and then she tells the man that she told her mother about them and their situation, but she never looked at him when she was talking to him. Her eyes were closed and directed toward the sun. She isn’t treating him like she cares; she is just caring on with her sun bathing. Then she tells him that she is going to have an abortion that afternoon. She does this without even asking the man if thats what he wants to do. Even after he expresses hatred towards the situation and basically tells her he wants her to keep the baby she doesn’t listen. She just insists that everything will return to normal when it’s done. He asks her what happened and she brushes the question off and explains her mother is ok with him. You can tell he cares about her mother’s opinion of him as he wants the reassurance that her mother actually likes him. The woman explains her mother just thinks she is fragile from depression. Honestly I feel like the women had had other abortions and just didn’t want to be honest with the man. After some time had passed, the woman asks him how long he was going to fish. He tells her about an hour and offers to row her to a swimming spot if she would rather swim. She turns down the offer and makes appoint to mention the fact that she has to be back in time to make it to her abortion later that afternoon; again making it known she is making this decision on her own. The women starts looking through her magazine while the man continued for a few more casts then he finally gave up and said, No sense fishing when the fish aint feeding. The whole point is catching fish, right? (71). This is the mans turning point. I think he realized that the relationship he was in was kind of like fishing, there was no point in him being with her if she didnt want to move on to the next level. Before rowing back into shore, he said he wished he could just leave here there. She gets very nervous when he said that and tells him they have to go back. Thats when the man decided that it was time to move on with his life and he said, You mean, you have to go back. † (71). He rows back and all the people are carrying on like they were before except now things are changing for them. The White woman goes with her towel and magazine to have her abortion and back to living with her mother, while the Black man goes on his own separate way while watching the women leave. Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8thth ed. Boston New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 67-72. Print.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Professional Sports - Athletes do Not Deserve What they are Paid :: Argumentative Persuasive Topics

Professional Athletes do Not Deserve What the Earn Wouldn't it be great to make 31.3 million dollars a year and an additional 47 million dollars in endorsements simply to play a game? Michael Jordan, along with many other professional athletes thinks so. In the 1996 season, playing 3,106 minutes Michael Jordan made 170,000 dollars a day, equaling out to be 160.97 dollars a second. Even more unbelievable are Mike Tyson's earnings in his match with Peter McNeeley. In a single second, he made 281,000 dollars ("Professional AthletesÉ"). Do these athletes really deserve all that money? "Professional athletes are making too much money in a society where salaries and wages are traditionally based on the value of ones work" ("Professional AthletesÉ"). In today's society, one will be paid more if their job is more economically important. However, teaching is one of the most economically important occupations because our future economy relies on the education of its youth, yet teachers are paid much less than the average professional athlete. The U.S President makes decisions that affect our economy and yet he only makes 250,000 dollars a year (Turner). Professional athletes do not play near as vital role in the economy as the president, but their salaries reflect otherwise. These games are supposed to be played for fun, not for millions of dollars. Opponents of this view say payment is being received for a service, therefore professional sports are a business. Many people believe athletes are being paid for little work, but in fact they work harder than any one else. Not only do they work during their particular season; they also work in the off season. Most professional athletes train on their own striving to become better. They also attend miniature camps and their seasonal training camps. These athletes work year round to earn their high salaries. Making it into the pros isn't an easy thing to do. It takes a tremendous number of hours of hard work and dedication every day to earn a job in professional sports. These athletes sometimes go through life threatening injuries for the love of the game. Considering this, one might think that these athletes do it for the love of the game not for the money. According to Gerald Sim, "The odds are higher for someone to become a brain surgeon than a NBA player, so isn't it more logical that the professional athlete get paid more than a brain surgeon?

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Politics and Society Essay

â€Å"There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That’s a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.† ― Robert Conquest[->0] According to the historian Robert Conquest, Joseph Stalin â€Å"gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled.† He was nonetheless â€Å"a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century.† â€Å"Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.† (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p â€Å"Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition.† (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, â€Å"According to some reports, entire groups of men were taken in one swoop by the NKVD. ‘Almost all the male inhabitants of the little Greek community where I lived [in the lower Ukraine] had been arrested,’ recalled one à ©migrà ©. Another reported that the NKVD took all males between the ages of seventeen and seventy from his village of German-Russians. †¦ In some stories, the police clearly knew they were arresting innocent people. For example, an order reportedly arrived in Tashkent to ‘Send 200 [prisoners]!’ The local NKVD was at its wits’ end about who else to arrest, having exhausted all the obvious possibilities, until it learned that a band of ‘gypsies’ (Romany) had just camped in town. Police surrounded them and charged every male from seventeen to sixty with sabotage.† In the city of Zherinka, â€Å"‘Ivan Ivanovich’ †¦ had his wife sew rubles [Soviet currency] into his coat because the NKVD was taking all the men in his town.† (Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941

Monday, January 6, 2020

Ticks, Suborder Ixodida

The parasitic arachnids we call ticks all belong to the suborder Ixodida. The name Ixodida derives from the Greek word ixÃ… dÄ“s, meaning sticky. All feed on blood, and many are vectors of diseases. Description: Most adult ticks are quite small, the largest reaching about 3mm in length at maturity. But when engorged with blood, an adult tick can easily expand to 10 times its normal size. As adults and nymphs, ticks have four pairs of legs, like all arachnids. Tick larvae have only three pairs of legs. The tick life cycle has four stages: egg, larva, nymph, and adult. The female lays her eggs where the emerging larva is likely to encounter a host for its first blood meal. Once fed, it molts into the nymph stage. The nymph also requires a blood meal, and may go through several instars before reaching adulthood. The adult must feed on blood a final time before producing eggs. Most ticks have a three-host life cycle, with each stage (larva, nymph, and adult) finding and feeding on a different host animal. Some ticks, however, remain on a single host animal for their entire life cycle, feeding repeatedly, and others require two hosts. Classification: Kingdom – Animalia Phylum – ArthropodaClass – ArachnidaOrder – AcariGroup - ParasitiformesSuborder - Ixodida Habitat and Distribution: Worldwide, there are nearly 900 species of ticks known and described. The vast majority (about 700) of these are hard ticks in the family Ixodidae. Approximately 90 species occur in the continental U.S. and Canada. Major Families in the Order: Ixodidae – hard ticks Argasidae – soft ticks Genera and Species of Interest: Both the blacklegged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis) and the western blacklegged tick (Ixodes pacificus) can transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.Proteins in the saliva of the Rocky Mountain wood tick, Dermacentor andersoni, can cause paralysis in its hosts, which include cattle, horses, dogs, sheep, and humans. Boophilus ticks are parasites of large hoofed mammals, and complete their life cycle on a single host. Amblyomma nuttali holds the record for the largest clutch of eggs produced by a single tick – over 22,000! Sources: Borror and DeLongs Introduction to the Study of Insects, 7th edition, by Charles A. Triplehorn and Norman F. Johnson.Synopsis Of The Described Arachnida Of The World, Texas AM University Entomology Dept. Accessed online December 31, 2013.The Encyclopedia of Entomology, 2nd edition, edited by John L. Capinera.The Distribution of Ticks, Centers for Disease Control. Accessed online December 31, 2013.Order Ixodida – Ticks, Bugguide.net. Accessed online December 31, 2013.Tick Biology, the Tick App, Texas AM University Entomology Dept. Accessed online December 31, 2013.