My independent reading book was A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. This novel covered many topics, and mainly was a social commentary on the troubled culture and society of post Second World War England. Evil is a very important tool used by Burgess, mainly in the thematic sense. A Clockwork Orange uses Evil in the theme of Good vs. Evil. The question in the novel is if forced good is better than chosen evil. Alex, the narrator, goes through a metamorphosis, from choosing evil, to being forced to be good, and then once again Alex chooses evil. Burgess leaves it up to the reader to decide which is more ethical, even though he does heavily support, with subtle details and motifs, that free will, even it results in a chosen evil is better than a forced good.“Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him”(Burgess 95)? Evil is also used in the novel to show the darker side of humanity, the side that allowed the narrator to rape, beat, rob, and terrorize innocent people in the city, with his band of thugs or so called “droogs”. The novel, because of this evil is repulsive, disgusting, and unsavory, and after reading more than 15 pages, the reader is left with a sick feeling simply because of the content being discussed. Evil is a powerful force, apparent in everything from literature to the nightly news, and no matter how much we try to reassure ourselves that evil will never touch us, it will, and A clockwork Orange is a perfect example of the ever present and permeating nature of evil.

http://www.ugo.com/dvd/a-clockwork-orange

http://www.redeemedreader.com/2011/09/behind-the-bookcase-a-clockwork-orange/

All The Pretty Horses is about three teenage American boys who run away to Mexico. Although this seems odd, considering the fact that many Mexicans go the other way and that their is some racial tension between white Americans and Mexicans, but they boys decide Mexico is the place for them. They do not have racist tendencies towards the Mexicans they encounter and one even falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy ranch owner. Hate is not a driving force in this novel.

One of the main characters, John Grady, falls in love with a Mexican girl named Alejandra. John Grady works with the horses on her father’s ranch. He is respected by the man, until he discovers of their affair. Upon learning of their affair, he has John Grady arrested and sent to prison, which he is eventually freed from. When John Grady returns to the ranch he finds that Alejandra’s father will not speak to him, and that Alejandra herself is not staying at the ranch. He speaks with his lover’s aunt, who tells him he can never speak to Alejandra again, and tells her that he does not hate her or her brother for what they did to him. John Grady does not feel hate in this novel.

Another character who readers may think John Grady would hate is the police captain that murders Blevins. Blevins is one of John Grady’s companions who is younger than him. Blevins had lost his horse in a storm, but found it in a Mexican village. He was forced to steal the horse back and is separated from John Grady and Rawlins, their other companion. Stupidly he returns to the village and kills a few people before he is arrested and later executed after being reunited with John Grady and Rawlins. After John Grady’s visit to the ranch, he decides to get his horse back as well as the horses of Rawlins and Blevins. As he does so he takes the captain hostage, but refuses to kill him, as he does not hate him. He just uses him to escape into the Mexican countryside. Once again John Grady proves his lack of hate.

The one place where hate does appear in the novel is in the prison that John Grady and Rawlins are sent to. John Grady and Rawlins do not hate anyone themselves, but they are hated by most of the inmates, because of their nationality. The inmates attack them daily and one is able to wound Rawlins enough to get him sent to the hospital. John Grady is forced to buy a knife and then defend himself from an assassin, who he kills. The hate that both men experience drives John Grady to do something he never believed he could do: kill a man.

Hate does not manifest itself in any of the main characters of this novel. Most of the lesser characters in the novel show friendliness, or at least hospitality. The lack of hate makes the prison environment even harsher and makes John Grady’s crime seem more justified. Hate is not a major theme in this novel, as it only manifests itself in one location.

Cormac McCarthy covers many big ideas in All the Pretty Horses.  However, one character completely embodies stupidity: Blevins.

Blevins is a thirteen year old boy that decides to run away from home to Mexico and to join a sixteen year old, John Grady Cole, and a seventeen year old, Lacey Rawlins, who he does not know, that are doing the same.  Blevins carries a revolver, which he shoots expertly, hitting a wallet spinning through the air, and rides a very fine horse which his companions envy.  Doesn’t sound too bad yet, but the stupidity is coming!

On their way through Mexico, the three encounter a storm.  Blevins panics, claiming that it is in his genes to be struck by lightning.  He lists a plethora of relatives who have been struck by lightning (it’s worth noting that has evidenced that he can not be trusted completely and that he is drunk at the time).  Against the advice of the others, Blevins tries to outrun the storm.  He takes his horse straight to the base of some mountains.  It floods and Blevins loses his horse, gun, clothes (which had metal buttons he believed would get him struck by lightning), and just about everything else besides his boots.

The three ride into a village with Blevins riding with John Grady.  John Grady and Rawlins tell Blevins to stay in hiding as they search town and find look for the horse.  They find it and come back to tell Blevins, but he has disappeared and only returns after they are asleep.  They decide to steal the horse just before dawn, but it is not where they last saw it.  So, Blevins decides to break into a house, where he finds the horse, and rides away on it, chased by men with guns, endangering Rawlins and John Grady, as well.

Have no fear! Blevins becomes even more of an idiot!  Eventually, he gets away, but decides to go back to get his gun.  He retrieves it and kills several people before getting caught and put in prison.

Stupidity can be found anywhere, even in the works great authors.  Stupidity is persistent, ubiquitous, and powerful.

Sadness can take over a person, sadness can take over a city, sadness can even take over an empire.
A very wise man once said to me, sadness is contagious. This is so very true. When I go home and my mum is upset, my mood is ten affected because I am upset that she is upset and then I go to school upset and my tend become upset. As you can see it is contagious. Sadness takes over the lives if the people around you and then eventually takes over your own.
This is proven in the Middle Ages, the whole world was depressed at the exact same time and nobody could escape it. Every person was dirty and the living conditions were terrible and there was famine and disease, and one of the worst diseases was Sadness. People could not escape the sadness that followed every single person around. When one person became happy for a reason, something bad would either happen to them or to someone close to them. It was a terrible time for the whole world and it’s a miracle that the world ever recovered from it.
Sadness took over the world at that time and I don’t doubt it happening again.
The wise man that I mentioned earlier on, was the great Rory Dezzutti.

The autobiography “I’m Not Really Here” by Paul Lake, is a book about a professional soccer players life and how and injury prevented him from being what he could have been.
Paul starts the book off with his childhood like any other autobiography. He starts to show the sadness in his life when he gets his irate injury. He was the up and coming player in English soccer, he was destined to be the best player of his generation and maybe even generations to come. He was playing in a game like any other when he swallowed his tongue and nearly died on the field.
He slowly recovered and started to play again about a month later, but there was always a fear in the back of his that something terrible would happen again.
And of course it did. He tore his ACL and was out for a whole year. On his returning game after a year of therapy, he tore it again and 6 months later he tore it one last time.
This forced Paul to retire and then the sadness kicked in. He went from being the golden boy of English soccer to a crippled 25 year old with no income. Things had gotten very bad. Paul became depressed and suicidal, he hit rock bottom.
This kind of sadness must be the hardest because he was riding so high and now was at the lowest of lows. Paul knows what life can be like when it is at it’s best and now he sees it at it’s worst.
This is a kind if sadness that takes years to overcome and a lot of therapy. Paul is now a married man and has a family, but he still occasionally struggles with depression and needs a lot of support to get over it.
This is the kind of sadness that I wish to never experience because it is the hardest to deal with.

Losing somebody close to me is the hardest thing that I have ever had to deal with. It makes you feel every single emotion that is possible to the human mind and body. But the emotion that takes over your life is Sadness.
The sadness starts with crying and a very open way of expressing it but then it evolves into this sort of inner sadness that is nearly impossible to get rid of. It builds up inside of you and then one day, after many days of letting it build up, it all comes out.
This happened to me last Friday. I was inconsolable, nobody could get me to calm down or listen to a word that they were saying.
Losing a friend is a experience that I don’t wish on anybody but it is not possible to explain the sadness that goes along with losing a friend. I have lost grandparents and it is unbelievably hard to deal with a family member passing away. But losing a friend is a completely different experience.
When my grandparents passed away, it was sadly expected. They were in there 80s and we knew that it was going to happen soon, as bad as that sounds. But when a friend dies, especially as a teenager, it is unexpected and a huge shock. I’m not sure whether the shock factor that makes it so hard or if it is the question of “what could they have been?” Never being answered.
I hope who ever reads this never looses a friend and never has to go through what I have been through twice now. I wish that no other person has to go through what I have been through. I wish that the sadness that I have felt over the last few years, is never felt by anyone again. But the most painful thing is, I know that those wishes will never come true

In the novel Huckleberry Finn, there are many characters that enact the characteristic Courage. It is about a young boy who runs away from his unhappy, Christian life into the dangers of the Southern wild. Along side him joins a runaway slave, Jim, who sticks by his side in order to go North for freedom. Huck has to deal with his conscious by deciding if the right thing to do is turn Jim in or not.  Huck learns that Jim is a caring man that wants to set his family free from the Slave Owners.  Over the journey Jim explains how Huck is the only white person to listen and treat him as an equal, which makes Huck feel uneasy turning Jim in. They grow a bond that can be entitled, ‘friendship’, because they help each other escape from the societies hands.

The courage that Huck shows is by going against what society tells him. Hucklebery Finn does not like following the rules, and rebels against everything he is told. The biggest insurgent act Huck contradicts is aiding a runaway. He risks his own life to help out a friend even when there is difficulty. “He displays the human virtue of heroism when he decides to free Jim from the clutches of the Phelps family.” (studymode) Just by him going with his gut instinct and not dealing with society means that he is an Upstander. It takes immense amount of self strength to turn your back on society standards. Facing the tough decision whether to help Jim was pressuring Huck. He had to act quick and made a final decision, “All right, I’ll go to Hell! Because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”(pg 207) A little white boy faced a family of Racist whites and whole heartedly stole his friend back.

Jim illustrates the biggest deed of courage in the book. In the end when Tom Sawyer is wounded from the gunshot, he risks his freedom in order to rush the white boy to a doctor. The doctor was surprised by the Slave’s act of heroism and states, “I never see a nigger that was a better nuss or faithfuler, and yet he was risking his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too, and I see plain enough he’d been worked main hard lately. I liked the nigger for that.”(page 272) For a white, educated male to state that he found courage in a black slave is very important. It shows that Jim was truly a friend of Huck’s and was willing to give up on what he wanted so badly just to help him. Jim’s honorable move made him receive his freedom.

Tokyo researchers and scientists have developed the EUFI technique (extrauterine fetal incubation), where they take a goat fetus and supply it oxygenated blood through a catheter that is inserted in a large vessel in the umbilical cord. They are placed in incubators that are filled with artificial amniotic fluid heated up. Yoshinori Kuwabara, the chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Juntendo University in Tokyo, became interest in artificial placentas after working with premature infants. As of now, he and his associates have been able to keep a goat fetus in the environment described above for up to three weeks. There was however technical difficulties and problems with the fetus. 

Although this idea seems extremely futuristic and perhaps creepy, we are still making unbelievable progress in controlling a pregnancy and making sure a baby comes into this world healthy and safe. Right now we have neonatology which gives infants mainly with health concerns special medical care. We are also able to work surgically on fetuses. There is the technology we have to assist reproduction: “in-vitro fertilization” and
“gamete retrieval-and-transfer”. Overall, its all very new and even more controversial. It’s shocking we have developed the technology to make the artificial womb. Who knows, maybe in a few decades that’s how we will be raising our children…

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/magazine/the-artificial-womb-is-born.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

In my dream that I had recently,  I portrayed an act of inner courage. I knew that the situation was risky and possibly dangerous, but I enacted it because of good morals and kindness.

It took place in a cute country field, during the night, with a full abnormally large white moon. There were stars shining bright in the sky, but you could not see beyond the campfire light. There was a distinct warmth of light that provided a large circle around us from the fire. There were trucks and camp fire chairs that huddled within the circle and provided a safeness. A strong scent of s’mores and campfire smoke was intertwined with the cool night air. There was music, it was country, but I can not remember what song or beat it was. Somebody was playing it out of their old rusty blue Dodge pick up truck. There must have been forty people at this bon fire party, with everybody laughing and chatting in their own little groups. (In this dream I was in first person view) Unlike the others, I was by myself just bouncing from one group to another. I was happy and carefree and actually enjoyed every person there. I didn’t recognize any of their faces, but they seemed to be welcoming and happy to see me there. I was becoming thirsty and grabbed a lemonade glass bottle from a red cooler that appeared next to a truck and walked over to the bon fire to admire the warmth. When I was sitting in a comfy chair roasting my front side, I looked beyond the flames and saw this adorable Tall guy. It was weird because I never saw him in my life, but I remember the one glance I looked at him He looked back. The quick connection between the stare was a lifelong conversation it felt like. I saw his life and felt sorry for him, he was genuine person and he was never given the chance to prove it. After the quick glance, I looked back at the fire and it was roaring hot and I got up and moved away. I looked up at the sky and saw a beautiful show of shooting stars and said “Look!”, and pointed upwards with the glass bottle in my hand. Everybody clapped and cheered and I glanced around to see everybody’s amazement, but I noticed the Tall Guy from before wasn’t happy. He was being surrounded by this obnoxious preppy girl, and he was trying to get away from her but she kept annoying him. He would lean away and push her off of him, but she would try again. More and more girls flocked to him while the other guys just watched the stars. He was getting so fed up with the girls he left the circle and walked into the tall grass beyond. The girls were dumbfounded and just walked away with failure on their faces. I placed my bottle on a truck bed and walked to where Tall guy trudged away. The pushed down grass was cold and dark, but I felt so bad for him I wanted to make sure he was ok. So I followed his long strides into the dark field and my vision adapted to the new scenery. It was a little hill with a grand lively tree on the top of it, the huge moon shining behind it. The wind rustled the leaves and a cool wind kissed my face, the smell of clean fresh air. Fireflies danced around my body and the infinite field. The warmth was completely gone and the bon fire was no where in sight. I was getting scared, but then I saw Him leaning on the tree looking away at the moon. His dark silhouette against the white moon made him seem monstrous, but I walked towards Him still.  The closer I got, the more I noticed that his shoulders were shaking. I placed my hand on his shoulder when I got close enough and saw that he was silently crying. I felt so heart wrenchingly bad that without a word I just hugged him. He hugged me back tightly and just silently stopped crying. One of those hugs that you truly can feel with deep meaning. When I woke up I felt happiness and  affectionate, like I just gave a hug to somebody. From my dream I helped Tall Guy, I made him feel better and gave him a chance to be who he really was. When I awoken, I smiled from the dream.

My interpretation of my dream has to be broken down. I believe the fire/warmth was my boundary line of safety. Have you ever heard of “Sometimes you have to move out of your safety zone to accomplish amazing things.”? This is a good example of it, because I wandered out of the protective warmth into the cold field. I was not in  a safe zone while in the infinite cold field trying to help Tall Guy. It was dark, cold and intimidating but my morals brought forth an inner courage rush. I wanted to help him more than the safety of my own being. I stood up against the unknown to try and do a good deed. Courage is “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear”(dictionary), and within my dream I was not really affected by the dangers or pain. My motives were to help a person in need. Another symbolism for the fire was home. It protected me from the dangers lurking beyond the light and provided me happiness and delight. The overall bon fire is a deep desire that I always wanted/want to do in life. It set the scene perfectly like one of those in a Hollywood movie. I never wanted it to end!

Courage is within us all. It might be used or portrayed in different ways, but deep down we all can stand up to fear. In my dream, I faced a ‘cold reality’ to help someone that was sad and hurt. There is different levels of courage, but in my opinion, any courage is still courage.

On December 1, 1969, the Selective Service National Headquarters at Washington, D.C held a lottery drawing. However, these winners didn’t receive millions of dollars in prizes. Instead, the lucky numbers selected were recruited to serve over in Vietnam. The inductees fell into the span of time between January 1,1944 and December 31, 1950. 366 blue pill capsules containing birth dates were placed in a large container and were drawn by hand. There was film, radio and TV coverage reporting the drawings live. You could imagine the anxiety these men were feeling. Unfortunately for them, there was two options; college or the military. Those selected while in college had to put their academic future on hold to serve. Even if you had no intentions on joining the army, you were still included in the “Vietnam Raffle.” Boys had little protection against the draft and showed this through protests. Not only was the anxiety raised for those inducted into the draft, but the family impact must have been detrimental. Mothers now had to deal with the fear of losing their son or son’s in combat.

http://www.sss.gov/lotter1.htm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/1969_draft_lottery

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2091084/Father-sacrifices-life-leaping-road-save-disabled-son-run-down.html

In June of 2012, a father named George saved his disabled son’s life by pushing him out of the way of an oncoming car, taking the blow himself. He was killed instantly, but his son lived to tell the tale.

This article really moved me. It’s so easy to say that you’d “die for someone”, or “take a bullet for someone” but I don’t think anyone could possibly be prepared if that situation ever came about. I could never imagine what it must be like to be in that moment, deciding to give the person next to you a chance to survive knowing that in the end, you wouldn’t. In this man’s case, I don’t think he even had time to think twice. Although George unfortunately did not make it, he saved his sons life, and judging from the article, he would not have had it any other way. Situations like these should raise awareness about things such as reckless and drunk driving.  George saved the life of his son, however it was not his time to die. He was only 62 years old and still had a lot of life to live. His killer was a 17 year old kid who was driving, obviously, very dangerously and his stupidity cut a man’s life much too short. One would think that after hearing stories like these, people would try to make better life choices but nobody seems to learn. Its so easy to be careless when you think that tragedy can’t happen to you or to your family. But someday it might be somebody else’s bad decision and it could be the life of somebody you love on the other end. Some sacrifices are important to make in life. But some of them, like the one George made for his son, are preventable.