Hw 21

• Beth’s husband had trouble sleeping on his back so Beth came up with an ingenious idea to solve his problem with out going to the hospital. Sleeping half way on a table and half on a bed. 

• Beth did not want other people taking care of her husband such as hospice. She felt that only loved ones should take care of a person so close to their death. Beth and her son Evan took care of her husband best way possible, together. 

• At death the room felt as still and as silent as it could be. 

• The toll of a loved one dying helps people feel a sense of how we are not immortal. 

When Beth said, at death the room felt as still and as silent as could be. I understood what she was talking about. I have had many people in my family die and I have felt this time and time again. But just recently I watched my grandma pass away slowly. It was very painful for me to watch and when her time came it felt like I was in a tunnel. My mind linked to hers, nothing could get in or out. It was silent in the room. I stood  watching her with my thoughts about her life and her last words. I couldn’t feel movement in the world. Until the link was naturally broken and I got to the point of acceptance. It was time to say my final good-byes, where I could touch her and she still would feel warm. That feeling is almost indescribable; there is a sense of power that when I close my eyes I can feel in the room, in silence and in my thoughts.

The toll of a loved one dying helps people feel a sense of how we are not immortal. When Beth said this statement I felt it with great power in my heart because I too have the extreme feeling of not being immortal. In the last couple of years I have seen my family members die making me lose my childhood dreams of living forever. The thing that made me feel immortality was never possible was when I had a friend commit suicide. Having someone that I knew my age dying put death in the front of my mind. This scared me because I am afraid to die. I always thought if I could, I would be immortal but then I know everybody I love would die one day and I would still be here. Having to deal with the pain of my loved ones dying and me staying alive is too hard for me to handle. Still I don’t know how to accept death.

Beth sparked ideas of joy and sadness in my eyes. She made me think of what good someone could do for the world but also how fast the world can "kill" you. She made me think about my family an actually help me think about death. From her confidence to speak in class it has made me feel better about my ability to write about my "death life".

Hw 19

Both my parents have lived to see death and illness more times then they want to admit. They have seen it in war, and in their family life. It stems from illness that cannot be healed. My parents understand death in a way I can’t imagine. Even thought I have seen death and illness so much in my life already.

My dad has witnessed death in ways I wish upon no man. He was drafted in to the army to serve in North Korea in 1969 while his brother was sent to the Vietnam. When he was there, he was fixing DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zone) signs a lot of the time and one day his unit was ambushed. He lost his best friend in the army in the first two minutes of the ambush and he was pined down for seven hours. He had to watch his best friend on the ground dead for this time. He analyzed everything he could think of. One of the biggest things he thought about beside his family was the idea of fate and if he believed in it. He ended up accepting that fate was real and accepting that if he died it was fate. Right then he was able to reconcile with death, face to face. He also knew that if North Korea attacked South Korea at full strength there would be no reinforcements ready to help the front line and he would have been dead in five minutes.

But his brother saw more death then my father would have ever scene. He was killing not only men but also children. This had a physiological effect on him and when he got back home my father knew he was changed in way that was not good for him. Also coming home his brother had to live with everybody in America being mad at him. Threw his pain he had five different types of cancers that not only my father watched him go threw but I did as well. He survived it all and he is living in Florida.

My dad saw even more illness and dying coming home from the war, when his father had stomach cancer. His father was a world war two veteran and by the time my grandfather saw a doctor he was incurable so he stayed at home to live out his life with his kids.

My mom lived with a mother that suffered from breast cancer. When my mom was 12 her mother was diagnosed with the cancer. Three long years later her cancer was dormant and the family was happy but it came back two years later this time proving incurable. My grandmother who I never meet lived her life out at home never going to the hospital again till she died. She lived out her days at home with her kids. Just recently the rest of my mom’s family has died, first with her brother whom suffered then died form lunge and brain cancer. He stayed at home to die not going and living at the hospital. Then her father died from a heart attack.

Unlike the modern social practice of dying in a hospital my grandparents died with their closest love ones at home. However they did go strait to the hospital when they were sick but they were determent not to make it a home. Both my grandparents were very religious so following their religious social practices my grandfather had a very catholic funeral and my grandmother had a very Jewish funeral. To this day my parents are not very religious but my mom want to be breed religiously and my dad wants a religious ceremony but to be cremated. They have not decided whether they want to follow the social normal if dying in a hospital or be like their parents and do their own thing.

I have scene a lot of death and illness in my family and I know I will follow the social normal and go to the doctor when I’m sick and I would like to die at home but only time will tell what I may do.

HW 18

The holiday Thanksgiving has gone form a anti-body practice of giving thanks for what you have and are given to a body–centered practice that is centered around eating till you are to full to move. On this holiday groups of people come together to be with one another and bring large amounts of food that could feed multiple families. This is the modern practice of this holiday. There is no meaning to the holiday now. People look to the holiday as a time to get together and see the people they love. But do they really love the people or the body-centered practice of the holiday.

At my families Thanksgiving we had enormous dishes full of the festive food that could never be finished. But not only the normal the enormous dishes of festive food were there, part of my family who are vegetarians walked in and with more huge dishes to share with everyone. There was double the food this year with the same number of people as every other people.

The after the meal of “thanks” in my family it comes down to the talk. Everyone in my family comes to the family room of where ever we are and sits down to talks. People notice who’s missing at first from the people with spouses not sitting next to them, like my late grandfather Sam Gordon and my late uncle Jim Cotter. People also notice when my grandma is drunk because after my grandfather died she fell in love with gin. My family could be a bunch of bad politicians after the awkwardness. The talk always starts out about the kids in the family and how school is. Then on to the way the D.O.E run and the latest governmental issue till it gets heated and again it gets very awkward. Till my dad who does not talk much in these conversations because its my moms family and he rather not get involved in it crakes a lame joke which they think is funny. I sit there staring in space and texting. I always look at my dad around eight and say lets go because I’m not having fun. No one is my age and no one wants to talk about anything but my school life and collage. It feels like I’m having the same conversation a thousand times. My family follows their cultural practice which is a body centered one. We don’t pray, we don’t say who we give thanks to, we just come and eat talk and leave on the same way we came.

HW 17

Dying has been a thought on my mind since I can really remember. I used to think about it a lot when I was younger. It is my greatest fear.

At the age of eleven I experienced the pain of death for the first time when my uncle, Ira, died of lung and brain cancer. I didn’t really know my uncle because he lived in Arkansas but it was still heart braking. My next encounter with death was when I was fourteen and my oldest and closest grandfather of 97 died peacefully of old age. This showed me that death could be “simple” and clean. This death for me was foreseen still I could not accept it. Then when I was fifteen my other grandfather died of a heart, he was the healthiest person I knew. He exercised every day by swimming and jogging. This event was outstanding to me that someone so healthy could just die with out warning. Nine month ago my grandmother died of old age. I was very close to her because I never knew my grandfather and it really hurts me that I couldn’t ever see or talk to her again. Then two month ago a big tragedy happened in my family, my other uncle died of a sudden stroke. I had seen him not one month before when he was visiting me from San Francisco. This felt unreal to me because it still felt like he was in my living room talking to me. I was very close with him and to here him dying was not acceptable to me. In the same week I had a friend kill her self by hanging. I had never thought I’d have a friend commit suicide. At this point in my life death was vivid and as real as it got but I had not flinched when I heard all this news I always just sit in silence because it all felt unreal. Till I cracked and could not hold the pain of death in anymore because real life had set in.

Death has changed my perspective on live. My family has past away so fast and I have felt the pain that my friend had felt before. I now always try to make life as fun as possible and do as much as I can in the time I have. All these people that have died have there own meaning and story in my life that makes me who I am. I’m scared of dying or wait, am I scared of the unknown. Just as I was afraid of the dark when I was four because I didn’t know what was in the dark. Does dying lead to something else’s? What happens after? That’s what I want to know. Why do we live now if we one day we die and then for all we know don’t know anything, don’t think, see, hear, just nothing. I will never have known I wrote this for Andy my 11th grade sociology teacher. This area is a place of weakness for me. A place I don’t like to enter in my mind because I suppress as much id it as I can because I can’t candle the truth. But what is the truth.

HW 11 - Project Part 1

I have been improving my diet for months before the food unit in order to get in better shape. I started by cutting out junk food, soda, white grains and fast food from my diet. Then I only ate foods with lots of protein and nutrition. This helped me lose wait, have more energy and helped me gain better self-control over my body. I was able to control my bad food urges but the new foods that I was eating were not always the best tasting if I didn’t have time to make it something good. So I cheated my diet by eating very small amounts of fast food to get the tastes I loved so much. Ultimately this disappointed me and when I was given this project I thought what I have been doing has helped me a lot by feeling better about myself and I wanted to help others.

Amhara came up with an idea or a dream, to make a facebook group that would be a protest against fast food for one week. There would be thousands of people invited and joining making it a movement. I liked the concept so I asked to join her group as an admin to work with her but she had already made the group. I became an admin then to just watch and see how people reacted because I did not agree with how she set the group up. People wrote on the wall as if it was a joke and criticized it saying one week is nothing you needed a real change by doing this for a month or for the rest of your life. I agreed because my food life style has changed because I keep up with my diet.

Ultimately the group did not get any buzz and I didn’t think that my original group idea was the right approach anymore. I thought about how people always want to be different and take challenges but not all people want to take the same challenge as everyone else. So I challenged my good friends as they challenged me to not eat fast food for a month and if succeed we would continue for another month but everyone would bring in one person they trusted to be part of this group. We saw each other on a regular basis so there was no reason to meet at certain times. When we meet we would tell stories about how the journey threw our food lives were going. For the first week the fast food world had be easy to leave for all of us but during the weekend it was tuff for some of us. During the weekend my friends were offered free fast food and it was hard but they turned it down. It took more time to make foods that tasted good, we had to do research to find healthy food places to grab fast meals not run by major corporations and it cost more money for this food.

My friends felt that the system of having someone close to you experiencing the same thing you were helped them stay on track because they didn’t want to fail someone they care about. The challenge they said was one of the things that drew them in because you always want to beat your best friend and to lose would be a big defeat. Then I had realized my activist goal had gone off track from making my group so exclusive people would want to join to a group a friends working to help one another be healthy. We did not stand as a number on facebook in the thousands, we had each other to look in the face and make sure we were living up to our challenge. We had to face the people we loved directly and tell the truth. Fast food is a drug you just want more. During the week so far I have felt more awake and full of energy.

HW 12 - Project Part 2

Overarching Thesis: 
Our culture has many dominant social practices that are nightmarish industrial atrocities and it is nearly impossible to change them.

Major Argument 1:
Many venture to change the “normal” food ways of America but corporate giants like Mc Donald’s and Tyson make they make it nearly impossible for a person to make a difference.

Supporting Claim 1:

Corporate giants such as Monsanto have power in the government so there is no debate over change to the food system.

Evidence 1: Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas was a Monsanto attorney and then in a court case that decided the seed saving conflict. Clarence Tomas wrote the majority option that allowed these companies to prevent famers from saving their own seeds.

http://www.cropchoice.com/leadstrya594.html?recid=540'

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Monsanto/farmerssued.cfm

http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/schmeiser.cfm

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/f/food-inc-script-transcript.html

Evidence 2: Margaret Miller was a chemical lab supervisor for Monsanto and to this day she is the FDA’s branch chief.

http://www.psrast.org/bghsalmonella.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

Evidence 3: Linda Fisher was the vice president of government and public affairs for Monsanto and then later became the EPA deputy administrator.

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Monsanto-Fisher-EPA-Job.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

Supporting Clam 2:

Large agricultural enterprises like Tyson have power over its Farms by being able to cut contracts and demand upgrades if they choose to.

Evidence 1: In McLean country Kentucky, Vince Edwards a Tyson grower offered to show the cameras of Food Inc. in side the chicken houses but after multiple visits by Tyson he changed his mind.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/ 

Evidence 2: After asking a dozen farmers one famer let Food Inc film in the chicken houses.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

Evidence 3: Carole Morison Perdue grower said, “ I understand why famers don’t want to talk because the companies can do what they want as far as pay goes because they control everything.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/comments/255197.pdf

Evidence 4: Carole Morison Perdue grower said, “The companies keep the famers under their thumb because of the debt the famers have. To build one poultry house is any where from $280,000 to $300,000 per house and once you make your entail investment the companies constantly comeback with demands of upgrades for new equipment and the grower has not choose, they have to do it or your threatened with loss of contract.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/comments/255197.pdf

Evidence 5: Carole Morison did not want to upgrade her chicken houses so in response to that her contract was cut.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/comments/255197.pdf

Hw 10

Food Inc. 
“The food industry has changed more in the last fifty years than it has in the last ten thousand.” Not for the better, for the worse. The foremost concept of Food Inc. is that America needs to change its agricultural industry the right way. America turned its agriculture world into a machine, so in humane that it is hidden from the public.

Food Inc. and Omnivore’s Dilemma have similarity and differences but the movie showed a more one-sided argument towards how bad the agricultural industry is. Compared to the book, which was more factual and informative acting as an unbiased opinion. The movie used images and facts to put forth the directors view on how the industry should be portrayed. In peoples minds this will stand out more because the harsh images that the director got of the industry are shown and not left to the imagination of the reader. In the movie they are able to state facts like “McDonald is the largest buyer of ground beef in America” and show the type of beef they are buying with comments on how it is made. But if this line were in the book it probably would not faze me as it did in the film because I would not have a graphic image sitting in my head. The movie also discussed more about the lobbyists in Washington and how they protect their industry. The book tells more about the actual farms the animals are coming from and the farms they should be coming from. The author, Michael Pollan worked on the farms getting the full experience of the industrial and non-industrial world.

When I think about Food Inc. I think of the animals being slaughtered, genetically grown food, sickness that can kill and then I think about how well the movie made me think like it. It also showed me another example of how our government is corrupt. The government does not put its peoples interests first but their pockets. The world looks to America not just as a role model but also as a source of income. If we are able to make food like corn cheaper than poor countries we might as well start killing them. The grains and food they once sold to the United States which possible made up their whole economy is now gone. Why does the government stand by while a food system is being built that is bad for people, bad for land and unsustainable?