Jonathan Livingston Seagull Essay Example for Free

Jonathan Livingston Seagull Essay â€Å"Never try to be better than anyone else†¦but always try to be the best you can be. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere instantly. † Elder gull Chiang to Jonathan Livingston Seagull on the need to be our best. And he is a seagull, so it must be true. (Bach, 1970) â€Å"Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor. † (Bach, 1970). Similarly policemen should not never shirk their duties and never fail to uphold their code of honor because in doing so they dishonor, not only themselves but also the whole police department. â€Å" for his reckless irresponsibility† the solemn voice intoned, â€Å"violating the dignity and tradition of the Gull Family † (Bach, 1970) A policeman must never indulge in irresponsible and reckless behavior as it violates the integrity and honor of the whole police department. â€Å"Life is the unknown and the unknowable, except that we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as long as we possibly can. † (Bach, 1970) Life in the criminal world is also unknown as a policeman can never know for sure what crime he might have to go prevent or remedy. He is put in place to protect his fellow human beings and that alone is his purpose. in doing that he must put his life at stake, even though he may have a family back home. Duty comes above all. However, if he sees any discrepancy in the department he is working for, he should honor the code of humanity and stand up against it. He must not be afraid to take risks for the betterment of his department and for the protection of the people. For the general good he must take a stand against injustice, just the way Jonathan Livingston Seagull did. He must not follow the discrimination practiced by the flock’s but instead be open to new and innovative ideas to fight crime. Much of the popularity of Richard Bachs Jonathan Livingston Seagull in the early 1970s surely lay in the spiritualization of sheer technique, as the gull, training for faster, more perfect flight, transcended his physical limits and became immortal. On a more banal plane there is some parallel in the distinctively American use of terms like goals and personal objectives. I have set new goals for myself often refers to quite material and short-run plans, but it has the headiness of moral purpose. Here, as in the presidential rhetoric, ideas of vigor and effectiveness are strongly bound up with motion: the achieving individual, like the nation, needs a shining locomotive to pull himself on. Bachs book is a kind of fable and the highest-ranking American work of fiction on the list, is anything but a violent suspense. Exiled from his flock for daring to fly for the joy of it, rather than following the dignified Gull family tradition, Jonathan discovers that his purpose in life is to help others find perfection. Nativistic returns to nature and the greening of America phenomenon lured the cultured to an asylum outside the culture. The dead weight of technology was dragging spirits that sought to soar into more elevated and ethereal zones. Reductionist theories of human nature harnessed to behavioral-analysis techniques sapped what little life remained in that generation which had suffered the loss of autonomous self. The search for transcendence drove that generation to seek a god within, and the Jonathan Livingston Seagull sub society was born. (Watson, 1983) The book is the real essence of the spirit of internal motivation. The human spirit, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, can soar. The inspiring story of the courage and persistence of a seagull can be translated into real life. Suppose Jonathan Livingston Seagull smartly runs a pattern of the following shape: Duties of beneficence are not owed to all persons equally, but only to those near and dear. In answer to the first objection, it matters not at all that Jonathan is an Italian seagull: we will do better to interpret these marks with English semantics. (This is, after all, pretty lousy Italian. ) In answer to the second objection, we might better figure out to whom we owe duties of beneficence if we respect the normal English meaning of words like near and dear than if we try to reason our duties out ab initio. Now why might this be true? The answer is that, for many people, moral insight is more easily achieved if they reason under the guise of interpreting an authoritative text than if they reason with Sartrean self-awareness that everything is up for grabs at once. This is taken to explain the staying-power of the worlds popular religions. Despite their bizarre metaphysics, these religions give their believers authoritative moral texts the interpretation of which yields greater moral insight than believers are likely to achieve on their own. References Bach Richard. (1970) Jonathan Livingston Seagull. New York: Macmillan Co. Watson, Christine. (1983). â€Å"Jonathan Livingston Seagull. † In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, vol. 2. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, pp. 808–810.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - Themes :: Kill Mockingbird essays

To Kill a Mockingbird - Themes Although the character of Boo Radley does not reveal himself until the end of the novel, he is important to all of the themes present in `To Kill a Mockingbird' One of the more dominant themes is prejudice. There are three main types of prejudice that are explored in the novel; racial prejudice, social prejudice and fear of the unknown. Racial prejudice is present throughout the novel in the people of Maycomb's everyday life, as it is a novel set in the `deep south' of America in the 1930's. This is a period shortly after the American civil war, so slavery's abolishment had occurred not long ago. Because this had not been around for long, most people's attitudes towards Negroes had not changed, despite efforts towards change. The situation that shows the best examples of racial prejudice is the trial of Tom Robinson. In his trial, Tom Robinson is misjudged and mistreated because he is black. One of the most prominent examples of this is the way in which Mr. Gilmer, Tom's prosecutor, calls Tom "boy." He uses a tone of voice, which one would use when talking to the lowest creature on earth, towards Tom and makes him look foolish. This is all because Tom is Black. The worst example of racial prejudice is Tom Robinson's trial verdict. All of the evidence produced by Atticus makes it clear that Tom is innocent, yet Tom is found "guilty". This verdict is clearly based on the fact that Tom is black, but also that he, a black man, felt sorry for a white woman. "I felt right sorry for her" This statement would have brought any jury of Southern America to outrage in the 1930's. To them it was not right for a Negro to feel pity for any member of the white community. Another example of racial prejudice in the novel is at Aunt Alexandra's `lady's meeting'. It also shows the hypocrisy that took place in Maycomb. Miss Merriweather goes on to explain the "sin and squalor" that is suffered by "those poor Mrunas" and makes herself seem most ethnically aware, but the she refers to Helen Robinson as; "That darky's wife" The way that Miss Merriweather uses this term as if it is everyday language shows that Negroes are not respected, and are given quite offensive names.

Dream Research Project Essay

What is a dream? Dreams are a symbol and link to the inner core of the human subconscious. Dreams as scientist say are stories our brains create while we are sleeping at night. Every dream is not the same, and their qualities depend, at least in part, on the stage of sleep in which they occur. There are different stages of sleep, REM sleep is the one dreams most appear in. REM stands for rapid eye movement in which brain activity is high and signaled by rapid horizontal movements of the eyes. Like all movies, dreams have story lines. Dreams in light sleep, stages 1 and 2, are like children’s movies short and simple. Dreams can be for as long as 20 minutes, to a few seconds. They can vary from normal and mundane, to surreal and bizarre. Dreams can often times drive creative thought, or provoke a sense of inspiration. Scientists believe everybody dreams, but sometimes we forget. We tend to forget when we naturally pass out of sleep through the traditional cycle. If a person is awoken directly from REM sleep (by an alarm clock), they are much more likely remember the dream from that REM cycle. Psychologists have also concluded that our daily activities while we are awake can have an affect on our dreams. However, scientists are unsure of what degree of an impact this makes on us. In one study a group of people wore red-tinted goggles before they went to sleep and there was another group that did not wear the goggles before they went to sleep. Even though anyone did not know the purpose of the study, when group that wore the goggles before they slept had woken the next morning, they had reported seeing more red images in their dreams than the people without goggles. According to First magazine, the average person has about 1. 460 dreams a year. That is 4 dreams every single day. In average you spend 10 to 30 percent of your sleeping time dreaming. You may think that vision is the only â€Å"dream sense† but it is not the only one. Vision is the prominent one, at least for sighted people. About half of all dreams an average person has have sound in them, but only 1 percent has taste, touch, or smell. However, a third of men and 40 percent of women have experienced smell or taste in a dream at least once in there life. Why do dreams occur? There is no shortage of theories as to why we dream. Some see dreaming as an important process through which all species with complex brains analyze and consolidate information. This is supported by the fact that most mammals dream. Other theories conclude that dreaming is nothing more than random brain activity that has little to no logical relevance. Another theory is that dreams reveal wishes or desires we are not aware of during waking hours. Unrelated to that completely another theory is that the human brain contains an ample overload store of information, memories, and emotions. During sleep, nerve cells fire at random, throwing bits of all of them together in random, wild ways. One of the first theories regarding dreams and dreaming was that Sigmund Freud. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams were heavy in symbolism and often showed the true intent and emotions of a human being. Freud saw dreams as wish fulfillment: disguised ways to satisfy unconscious desires that are too upsetting to face consciously. Dreams might therefore offer clues to unconscious conflicts. Freud For instance, sexual desires might appear in a dream as the rhythmic motions of a horseback ride, or conflicting feelings about a parent might appear as a dream about a fight. Freud called dreams the â€Å"royal road† to the knowledge of the unconscious mind. Freud’s analysis of dreams brought about much controversy, especially amongst contemporary psychologists. Psychologists of today believe that dreams do have meaning; however, meaning is based upon the individual, not a set logic or theory as proposed by Freud. A very popular theory today is that dreaming specifically through REM sleep is essential for making memories. Several observations support hypothesis. For one when learning a new skill, REM sleep episodes are more frequent and last longer. When the new skill is mastered, those measures drop back to the normal average. Also during REM sleep, areas in the brain’s memory forming regions appear to â€Å"replay† patterns of nerve firing associated with the new learning.

Similarities And Differences Between Bianco And Mao Zedong

Until the mid-twentieth century, China’s government stood in its own way of economically advancing and modernizing. China’s path to communism is somewhat of a surprise and debated topic due to historians access to available resources to find and analyze the complete story for why the country went socialist. Two of the biggest leading historians of Chinese politics at the time included Lucien Bianco and Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong lived from 1893 to 1976 in which a part of his life was spent under the rule of a Feudalist system before reforming the country into a red state. Lucien Bianco was born in 1930 and most of his life still consists of living under a communist government. Both authors offer distinctive different answers for what†¦show more content†¦For many families in China at the time, farming was one of the few careers in life that residents believed was a relatively stable job that consistently supported families long after original owners of the land pas sing. This was true until the warlords of middle China decided upon themselves to increase taxes in order to combat Japan’s invasion of the country. Many residents who stood in warlords’ regions of China were not fond of higher taxes and certainly did not like the fact that Japan was the reason they were increased. In the 1930s, Chinese farmers could not afford to pay their newly raised taxes. A number of Chinese residents saw the war as an issue they did not want anything a part of. The outrage was loud and clear, Chinese citizens wanted Japan out of the country and an end to higher taxes. Bianco believed that the only way for these two problems to be resolved must come in the form of new leadership and governance. For Bianco, Zedong was bound to be their leader and guide the people of China into a new system of governing. Zedong represented a change to the current economic climate most of the countrymen wanted. Mao embodied the needed leadership for the proletariat p oor working class through voicing their concerns and uniting the people under a central form of government. Some of the largest concerns people in rural areas like villages faced were financial issues and invasion of the JapaneseShow MoreRelatedManagement Course: Mba−10 General Management215330 Words   |  862 PagesManagement, Fourth Edition I. Management 17 17 2. The Evolution of Management Thought Hughes−Ginnett−Curphy †¢ Leadership, Fifth Edition I. Leadership is a Process, Not a Position 51 51 70 1. Leadership is Everyone’s Business 2. Interaction between the Leader, the Followers the Situation Cohen †¢ Effective Behavior in Organizations, Seventh Edition 11. Leadership: Exerting Influence and Power 94 94 Text Palmer−Dunford−Akin †¢ Managing Organizational Change 2. Images of Managing Change