A Comparison OfHomeless On Campus And Defying The Odds

When telling the reader about the Box Man’s choice to be homeless, Ascher refers to an anecdote where the Box Man encounters the mayor of New York City, “Last winter, Mayor Koch tried, coaxing him with promises and the persuasive tones reserved for rabid dogs. The Box Man backed away, keeping a car and paranoia between them.” When describing this scene, Ascher makes the mayor sound condescending by using words like “coaxing” and comparing the way he speaks to the way one would speak to “rabid dogs”. The way that the mayor treats the Box Man makes the reader feel sympathy for the Box Man and the way homeless people are treated, and the readers feel guilt due to the way they might have treated homeless people like the Box Man. This advances Ascher’s argument and further persuades the reader to reflect on their own actions and thoughts towards the idea of homelessness. Another tool that Ascher uses to help argue that homeless deserve respect is precise diction.

Everyone knows that poverty can lead to feelings of shame and humiliation, but what many people don’t realize is that sometimes overwhelming feelings of shame and humiliation lead to poverty. In her article “In the Search of Identity in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,” Maria de Valdes goes as far as to refer to shame and poverty as a “syndrome” because she believes they’re so closely associated. “It is a closed circle,” Valdes asserts. “You are poor because you are an outsider without education; you try to get an education, but you can’t take the contrastive evidence of poverty and ‘it keeps you down.’” In other words, poverty and shame are an endless cycle because a person will be ashamed to be impoverished, but won’t be able to move up because shame will always hold them back. This can be seen in Esperanza’s mother, who didn’t finish school because she was too ashamed that she didn’t have nice clothes like the other girls. “Shame is a bad thing, you know,” she warns Esperanza. “It keeps you down” (91). Shame kept her down by preventing her from finishing school, and in turn her lack of education kept her from pursuing her dreams. Instead, she settled into the housewife life, which she still regrets: “I could’ve been somebody, you know” (91). She says it sadly, like she’s mourning the loss of what

I was able to compare my own experience of moving from Guatemala to his journey towards the United States. The reason I mention health disparities is because it greatly impacted our lives. For example, I lived with a supportive family, inside of a safe neighborhood, and given an opportunity of excellent education. Luis, on the other hand, was involved in a gang affiliated family, an unsafe neighborhood, and given low quality education. The opportunities I was given was the chance of getting a free degree from a college in Roswell, I was taught good morals such as independance and determination, a full time job with benefits, and although it’s indirect, the health disparities I was involved in is what helped me to achieve these opportunities to a positive future. The same applies to Luis, but he managed to overcome the obstacles that came with the terrible environment he was involved in and managed to become a good example for not just his family, but others who read this story who may be influenced. Perhaps one day I could write a story of my own about my experiences in order to reach out to my generation, just as Luis

I liked bell hook’s essay “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”. Bell assesses the light in which higher class people view the poor or lower class. Bell hooks, also known as Gloria Watkins grew up in a small Kentucky town where her father worked as a janitor for the local post office. As one of seven children she was taught that money and material possessions did not make her a better person but hard-work honesty and selflessness determined character. Her hard work landed her acceptance into Stanford University. Although she received various scholarships and loans, her parents worried that she would not have enough for books and supplies or emergency funds. Regardless of this, belle went on to earn a Ph.D. Her experiences and education earned her a very good reputation and even an authority writing critiques on popular culture and diversity (hooks 431-432). She uses ideas in her essay “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, that stem from her own personal experiences with poverty to add credibility to her writing, as well as examples from pop culture and mass media to demonstrate how these representations portray the lower class in ways that radiate negative stereotypes. She wrote the essay because she saw how the poor had many assumptions made about them. It wasn’t until college thought that she made that discovery. She discovered how unjustly they were represented due to the

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is about a Dominican family who lives in Paterson New Jersey and they have been through many tribulations in life. The theme I chose for my essay is Fuku and Love, in the novel these two themes were mainly the reason why the characters got their self in situations they could not overcome. The novel is overall about finding love and overcoming the family curse.

In the novel Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler paints a picture of a dystopia in the United States in which the current societal problems are overly exaggerated into the worst-case scenario. Butler describes a world plagued with high unemployment rates, violence, homelessness, a flawed police system, and a crumbling education system. Butler focuses the story on the poor and the homeless by only giving characters with this background a voice in order to show the reader that society’s views and stereotypes of these groups are flawed. Butler shows the lack of attention they receive and over exaggerates the problem in order to show the extreme consequences if it is not properly addressed.

Life’s challenges can shape peoples lives in both positive and negative ways. In “Shaving” by Leslie Norris, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, and “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst we watch how difficulties affect these characters. They show how the hardships either cause the protagonist to excel or fail and deal with the consequences. Hurst, Frost, and Norris all use literary devices to show how the characters handle their problems and how it ultimately affects them Both Hurst and Norris use diction to show how their characters deal with illness in their family.

The authors of the four memoirs overcame their childhood obstacles by reconnecting with their parents. Gary Soto overcame his problem of not wanting to work in the fields by reconnecting with his mother. Laurence Yep reconnected with his father and found out that he loves him for who he is which helped him change his perspective that his dad didn’t like him. When Barack Obama’s father came to visit he reconnected with him and his fatherly love resolved Barack’s problem of not having friends in school. The cause of Julia Alvarez’s parents sending her and her siblings to an American school reconnected herself with them and fixed her issue of living in a dangerous country. Authors of memoirs describe overcoming obstacles to teach readers

While reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano both of these men face adversity in different times and ways. One man is praised for being one of America’s founding fathers while the other was a slave kidnapped from his home in Africa. Though the two stories do not connect in any way or have that much in common, what they do have is that both these man face and overcame adversity. These men lived two very different lives. One lived the life of an educated, wealthy, while male in America. While the other lived the life of an uneducated, poor, black slave in America. These men lived different lives yet they both were confronted with adversity and had to conquer adversity in their own individual ways.

Dinaw Mengestu, Richard Rodriguez and Manuel Munoz are three authors that have been through and gone through a lot of pain to finaly get accepted in their societies. They are all either immigrants or children of immigrants that had trouble fitting in America’s society at the time. They struggled with language and their identities, beucase they were not original from the states and it was difficult for others to accept them for who they are. They all treated their problems differently an some tried to forget their old identeties and live as regulalr Americans others accepted themselves for being who they are, but they all found a way to deal with their issues.

There are many occasions in life in which a person faces an arduous task and falls short of their goal, and in many cases they ultimately lose sight of what is important in life. Through trials and triumphs, it is a person's character that truly defines their successfulness in life. Ernest Hemingway, author of Old Man and the Sea, skillfully uses Santiago’s words, “A man can be defeated but not destroyed,” to echo the resiliency of not only an old man, but of the nature of the entire human race, throughout his novel.

Mariatu was an incredible girl who used her hardships to motivate herself and achieve success. Like Mariatu, John Chung is also an immigrant that endured many hardships. Even before coming to Canada he endured a life of isolation. He was constantly being bullied in elementary school for being poor. Losing his self confidence, he built a wall that he couldn't jump over. He turned to his sister for comfort, a person who guided him through life, helping him to slowly break that wall. Entering university, the people who bullied him were gone, the wall he failed to jump over finally broke down. He endured a childhood of emotional and physical bullying, and continued to face it everyday because he knew he could overcome them. “I have my sister to thank, if it wasn't for her, I probably would've ruined myself.” said John. When facing challenges, they don't have to be overcome alone. John's sister helped him break that wall, bringing him a steady road ahead.

This essay has a very important theme, which I believe is Self-Acceptance. The main idea is that we cannot get stuck in the rut of comparing ourselves to others. Everyone is unique, and it is the uniqueness that allows us to be who we really are. I think that the theme can also be, moving on and living your life. This essay was very interesting to me in that I relate to it very closely. Irania Patterson came to speak and presented a wonderful poem at the end. The poem discussed how, we all have events and scars that we don’t like or want to forget. But it is these same scars that make us who we are, and shape us as people. The whole point of Irania’s poem is to, not discount the scars by simply moving on, but to come to an acceptance where we can understand them as a part of ourselves. They become our image, and we can either let them be a good side or a bad side that people see.

Additionally, disfluency has been shown to reveal metacognitive processes, or thoughts on one’s own thoughts or ideas (Galak, Nelson, 2002). One study demonstrated that when participants were asked to guess the distance from one city to another, those who were presented with a disfluent questionnaire guessed much greater distances than those who received a fluent questionnaire (Alter, Oppenheimer, 2008). In fact, those who were presented with disfluent questions guessed an average of 1,331.7 miles, while those with the fluent questions guessed 641.9 miles. This study suggested the participants used visual text fluency as a proxy for distance estimation, and the disfluent text caused people to guess greater numbers. Stepping back, this study

Poverty displays itself as the undeniable reality of what our society displays that needs to stop so that future generations do not become forced to live the terrible life it manifests. Poverty is an international problem that has the potential to end if individuals work together to care enough. In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez explains the struggles of a Mexican-American student in poverty that expresses his hunger to become a writer and a teacher one day. In contrast, in Nora Ephron's The Boston Photographs the families that appear in the photographs display tiredness of how they have the ability to live in poverty. While a long time period separates these two pieces of work, both discuss families that appear to struggle due to the effects of poverty in their everyday lives. However, whereas Rodriquez illustrates the willpower and hunger to want to move on from his lifestyle that he lives and overcome his impoverish state, Ephron demonstrates how families in The Boston Photographs want to end their lives since they will have nothing else due to their state of poverty.