My Sister, Jimmer, and the Beginning of Fourth Term

            These past few weeks have been pretty eventful. My sister won her pageant, BYU made it to the sweet sixteen, and the school year is almost over.

My sister has been involved in quite a few pageants in her lifetime. She has done the local and state ones since ninth grade. She is great at a lot of the things they do during the pageants, like her talent, playing the violin. She has played the instrument her whole life so she is amazing at it. She played a song called Czardas at this pageant recently. It was a gypsy kind of feel song. The fast parts are way fun, but there is also a slow part which is pretty too. Another thing she is good at is the interview and the scholastic competitions. She won in both of these categories, owing to the fact that her grades are very good and she is also very talented at talking to people in an interview setting. This pageant recently was Utah’s Distinguished Young Women. It was the Utah’s Junior Miss Pageant, but they changed the name. Anyway, my sister won this pageant, which was pretty amazing. She won a lot of scholarship money, so that is great for her. Plus she gets to go to Mobile, Alabama in the summer to compete in the national competition.

            A word that has been on a lot of people’s tongues lately is Jimmer. Jimmer can be a noun, an adjective, a verb, a pronoun, or an adverb. People cannot get enough of this basketball star. Jimmer Fredette was BYU’s star point guard. He was the arguably the best scorer in the NCAA, and was amazing at hitting his signature long range shots from well beyond the three point line, sometimes at 30 feet from the basket. This year he took BYU to the sweet sixteen. After making it to this round, BYU played Florida, who they lost to in overtime. This was sad but not as sad as the fact that this was Jimmer’s last year at BYU. Sadly, The Jimmer Era is over.

            As third term ended, I was completely swamped with assignments and tests. But now that the term is over, it looks like a pretty easy ride for the rest of the year. In my English class we wrote in our journals about what we thought about almost being done with Junior High, which got me thinking about how fast three years can go. When you’re in school, you think it will never end, but in reality, the time is going by terribly fast. With one term left to go with my experience at Fairfield, I am feeling exited but sad that I am growing up so fast. I have already applied for a job at Cherry Hill this summer, which is another reason to be scared that I am growing up too fast. Pretty soon I’ll be graduating from High School and going off to college. Hopefully in these next few years I can do everything I can to make the time go by slower and make the time more meaningful to me in the long run.

           

A Tale Of Two Cities Literary Analysis

            After reading A Tale of Two Cities, I was assigned to write a literary analysis on a significant passage that I read. It wasn’t very hard for me to choose which passage I wanted to write about because I had marked this one with a sticky note beforehand. I like the poetry and figurative language used in the passage that will be identified in my literary analysis.

           

            A Tale of Two Cities, written by Charles Dickens, tells the story of a family living in England during the French Revolution. The pages of this book follow the sad story of the hate, revenge, and death that took place in the French Revolution.  Developed in this book, is the theme that the lust for revenge can completely destroy a people.  The following excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities tells of how revenge twists people’s minds into terrible things. On page 374 it reads,

“Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”

            In this passage, the crude carriages are taking the condemned aristocrats to the Guillotine. Sydney Carton is on one of these death-carts.  Although not an aristocrat, he is posing as his friend who is one. This is the major climax of the book, when Carton is going to sacrifice his life in order for his friend to live.

            The carts are old and rickety, and the spirits of many dead aristocrats seem to dwell there. The day’s wine is the blood that is routinely spilt by the guillotine. All the fears that the convicts had before, are put to shame by the terrible Guillotine. On the other hand, the Parisians are captivated by the death and blood of aristocrats, almost as if it’s a drug. Nothing happy or good can take place when such hate and death are the main focus of a society. These blood thirsty people have been so fixed upon an end goal of eliminating all inequality that they have become a twisted people, doing evil things they never would have done before.

            The tone of the passage is mournful. The voice seems to lament over how such a crime could be committed. The voice is also a voice of caution, a warning to never let something like this happen again.   

            This passage follows the theme of how the lust for revenge can completely destroy a people. The words portray the pain, suffering, and death that the lust for revenge brings. It illustrates how nothing good can happen to a nation full of blood-thirsty people. Then, it warns us of how we must work hard so these terrible events will never repeat themselves.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Imagine sitting outside and enjoying the bright blue Israeli sky, listening to the hustle and bustle of people around you. Suddenly you hear a huge explosion and screams of women and children. The restaurant across the street has been bombed by a suicide bomber. Bodies lay across the street as you run to see what help you can give. People are dying because of an age old conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

           

            Long ago, Israel was ruled by Jews, their native people. Later, Romans took the land and renamed it Palestine. Next, Arabs took over this much sought of land. Many years after this, in the 1800, Jews were searching for a homeland. They wanted to live in Palestine. And so, Jews started to immigrate into Palestine. At first, it created no problems, but as more and more Jews started to arrive, the Palestinians began to get mad.

            On November 2, 1917, the British Government signed the Balfour Declaration. This decree stated that Jews should be able to populate their homeland. At that time Arabs, now called Palestinians, still populated most of Israel and did not want to give up their land to the Jews. Jews coming back to Palestine enraged the Arabs, leading to much civil unrest and fighting.

                                                                                         

            After the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were killed, the United Nations stepped in and gave 55 percent of the Palestinian land for the Jew’s homeland. After this came the 1947-1949 war, where the Jews took over 78 percent of Palestine and killed thousands of people in 33 massacres across the country. The Jews wanted to erase any memory of Arabs living in Palestine, so they even made a new map of the country, renaming every town and geological feature.

            The result of this war led to 726000 Palestinian refugees that fled to places where Palestinians could live. They ran to the West Bank and the Gaza strip, two areas in Israel that were still owned by the Palestinians. They also went to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The amount of Palestinian refugees has since increased to 4 million. Many live in temporary shelters or tents.

            The six day war came when Israelis took back the part of the land they had not been able to get before, The Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They also completed a surprise attack on Egypt and in that way acquiring even more land. Although the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are under Israeli occupation, these lands still technically belong to the Palestinians.

            These events lead to much hatred on both sides of the conflict leading to a lot of fighting. The Palestinians are intent upon destroying Israel with violence, resulting in things like suicide bombings and riots. Thousands of Jews have been killed and injured in these attacks.

            The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has plagued the lives of people for ages. Thousands of people on both sides of the conflict are killed each year in this seemingly never-ending war. And with new riots breaking out everyday, the question is, will it ever stop?

A Story of a Pair of Metropoli

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”

When I first started reading a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens starting with this passage, I thought myself stuck in a bottomless pit of words and culture. I was definitely having the worst of times.   I saw no way out, with 380 pages to read, I wanted to despair, but I kept on going despite the difficulty of the book. Glenn Beck refers to these kinds of books and movies as “bonnet movies” where everyone has gum disease, speaks in weird accents, wears ruffled collars, and oddly, everyone seems to be wearing a bonnet. While some of these things might not be true for A Tale of Two Cities, I still found myself agreeing with Beck that these stories just seem to be mostly about the plot, wigs, and gum diseases. Today, many men such as myself crave “laser movies”, which have a lot less plot but are really heavy on the special effects and explosions.

Even though at first, my experience with Dickens made me want to quit, after a while, I started to get into the book. It seemed like, during the last 100 pages, the action and happenings really kicked up, so for that last bit, I actually found myself not wanting to put the book down. The book started to seem less and less about gum disease and powdered wigs. I started to connect with the characters in a way that I never thought could have been possible. I found my self worried and nervous that the Manettes wouldn’t make it out of France in time. I was scared that Madame Defarge was going to kill Miss Pross. It’s really wonderful how Sydney Carton saved the day. I liked how before, he was a total mess up in life. Then he saw how he could redeem himself and feel justified. Although there aren’t any explosions, special effects, or changes in the gravity, A Tale of Two Cities drew me in more than I ever thought possible.

I also enjoyed the book because of the religious content it had in it. It is refreshing to read something where the author isn’t afraid of offending someone or not being politically correct like many authors are today. I really like the scripture in John 11:25-26 that Carton kept quoting before his death:

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
Like Carton, I found myself thinking more deeply about what that means to me and how I am working on believing in Christ by trying to do what’s right.