Comparison ESSAY!

Fictional but Real

More than fifty years ago, Ray Bradbury wrote a novel which is now a classic Fahrenheit 451. It is set in a dystopian world. And by dystopian, it means a society characterized by human misery. In the novel, Montag was asked by a seventeen year-old girl named Clarisse, if he was happy. And he realized, he wasn’t , so he wanted to end the thing that kept him unhappy and that thing is the society he was dwelling in. How about our world? Can we describe it dystopian like the world shown in the novel? Or is our world completely different with Montag’s?

The government depicted in the society of Fahrenheit 451 manipulates the lives of its constituents. They say they have to promote ignorance for everyone to be equal, so that no one would feel inferior to people who knew more than they do. It is how they perceive equality, through ignorance. In our world, sometimes the government keeps secrets from us too. Not informing the people of what really is going on, only to protect their well-respected names. They want to look good in people’s eyes but when no one is looking, they go back to their own activities. Very evident in most countries is corruption. In our world, keeping people ignorant is a way to steal rights and power from the majority.

To keep knowledge away, people in Fahrenheit 451 are spoiled with shows in the television in which the characters are who they consider to be “family”. This “family” teach the viewers that violence is fun. Throw a huge rock on somebody then make a good laugh about it, that’s how they do it. As what Will.i.am said in a song, “kids want to act like what they see in the cinema”, and what do we see in cinema or television these days? Violence, isn’t it? Parents leave their children in the living room watching scenes that corrupt their young minds. Cartoons serve to be the foundation of violence for kids. They think that it’s funny to hit somebody as what shows like Tom and Jerry suggests.

Since Fahrenheit 451 is set in the future, technology is expected to be hundred times better than ours. For me, there were more bad effects than advantages. People us technology advancement to promote ignorance and violence. Bradbury’s wild imagination was also shown by introducing the mechanical hound, electric-eyed snake, seashell radio, and the bullet size audio transmitter. Our technology is continuously improving and all of these are innovative ideas, but it has good and bad effects too. We may feel comfortable with all these innovations but it gives us reasons to be lazy and to be dependent on technology.

The world in the novel prohibits people to own and read books and a fireman’s job is not to put off fire but to start fire to burn books. Readers are criminal in their society. For them, to read a book needs a lot of concentration, but with their fast and loud society it wasn’t possible to have that concentration. Books only give them confusion with things and it only creates inequality in their society. Books in our society today is still alive but because of continuous revision, these books are somehow burned or as Bradbury puts it in the novel’s coda “skinned, deboned, demarrowed, scarified, melted, rendered down, and destroyed”. From books they become compressed files like the downloadable e-books form the internet or they may be summarized into essays then to paragraphs then finally into a single definition in the dictionary. It is not far for our world to view books the same way books are treated in Fahrenheit 451.

Looking at our government, entertainment, violence, technology, and books today, it isn’t impossible that in the future, our world would become like Montag’s. We aren’t massively different from the fictional world in Fahrenheit 451. The issues in their society are also the issues in our real world. We may not be living in a dystopian world today, but who knows one day, the government will implement banning of books to control the society.

Narrative Essay!

Sorority Member at Eleven

It happened when I was in fifth grade. I belonged to the section where in there were more problematic students than the ideal type of student a teacher would want. While the other section was being praised because of their good performance and behavior, we were reprimanded of our unique characteristic. Not everyone was really problematic. In fact, I am part of the fifty percent who probably knows how to behave. It was because of the notorious bullies in our class that led us to be over-generalized and tagged as the”worst” section. It wasn’t our fault; if only they equally distributed the bullies between the two sections, there could have been no labeling the good or the bad class.

The greatest misadventure we had was when the class attempted to create a fraternity/sorority. The bullies actually started it. One of them was exposed to that kind of environment, and he decided to share it to us. Almost half of the class had joined the so called “fraternity/sorority”. I asked my recruited classmate, what do they do in a fraternity/sorority but he just simply said, “Just join so you’ll know”. My other friends also wanted me to join. Without knowing what it is all about, I was influenced to join by my peers. On an afternoon during dismissal when everybody else had left, we were getting ready for the initiation. They blindfolded me and my other three classmates with a Rasta designed handkerchief. I was very scared at that moment, I don’t know what they’re about to do with me, but somehow I trust them. The leader then asked us if we were sure of being in the group. The other three responded yes and so I also said yes, but I know I wasn’t sure of what I was doing. But I don’t have time to think about it all over again. There’s no way escaping anymore, I thought. For a moment, I was just standing silently, and then I felt them surrounding me. A hand slapped my left cheek, the then the right. It felt like nothing. If not nothing, then it was like a harsh touch by a smooth hand. Then I thought, there’s more than that, a punch on the face maybe. But I was wrong, that was it, the “initiation” was done. They proclaimed us their new brothers and sisters after removing the blindfold. What happened went running in my mind that night. Suddenly, I wanted to quit and tell them the next day. It just so happened that I don’t have to. A parent caught my other classmates doing the initiation in the school’s playground on a late afternoon during the past week. She told the principal about it and the principal went to our classroom to give us a little talk. Some of us cried because of the fear that our parents might know about it. The bullies who started it went to certain consequences.

So I was a fraternity/sorority member for fifteen hours, more or less. In the event that it wasn’t caught, I know it still wouldn’t last. Of course, we’re just eleven-year olds pretending to know the gangster’s world. Looking back at the experience, I realize how silly I was as a kid and also how stupid our class was but I certainly learned something from them and that’s never to make a fraternity/sorority especially if you’re still in fifth grade.

Cause and Effect Essay

Being a Filipino-Catholic

Raised in a Filipino family, it has been our tradition to pass down Filipino cuisine recipes from generation to generation. Our cuisine compliments one of our main agricultural products, rice. Rice has been a part of every Filipino meal even before the colonizers came. Without eating it, Pinoys can't go on a day. My culture is not only known for food, but also for our close family ties. We show respect to elders by the doing the mano, which is drawing the the elders' hand near to our forehead. For Tagalogs, they also show respect by using words like “Po” and “O po”. Filipino culture teaches children to respect elders and value the family. An addition to the rich Philippine culture is our major religion, Catholicism. Our faith taught us to pray before and after sleeping and eating. On Sundays, my family go together to attend the holy mass. It has also been a part of us to make the sign of the cross as pass by the church. These traditions and practices only show how my faith and culture influence my everyday life. I only hope that several years from now, the Filipino-Catholic culture will still be marching on.