Voluntary and Involuntary Change ft. Choices

Just yesterday in a class discussion someone said that the Native American adaptation to the European colonial system in the Americas was voluntary. According to this person there is no involuntary adaptation because every native had a choice between dying and accepting the system. If anyone really didn’t want to adapt they could choose to die, and thus those who choose to survive are adapting voluntarily. In the second chapter of Sidewalk, Duneier discusses choice, and tries to define when change can actually be considered voluntary. Rather than trying to analyze the European colonies and the acceptance process of Native Americans however, Duneier focuses on the magazine vendors of Sixth Avenue and how they came to live in the sidewalk.

Marvin is the leader of all magazine vendors in Greenwich Village. He is a Vietnam Veteran and came back home to pay time in prison for an armed robbery he didn’t actually take part in. When he failed to find a job in the automobile business he moved to New York with his cousin and eventually began drinking. He had a wife, and even though he loved her alcoholism took him slowly away from her. After seven years of street dwelling he managed to sober up by asking for help from the VA (Veteran’s Administration) Medical Center and joining Alcoholics Anonymous.  His reason for living on the sidewalk: couldn’t find a job.

Ron is one of the best magazine vendors in NYC and he is also Marvin’s partner. When he was eleven he was summoned to America by a mother he had never met. He was kicked out of high school in tenth grade because of excessive absences. It turns out the reason he skipped school was because he was scared of the older kids who carried guns around campus. Both his parents were alcoholics and he followed the family trend perfectly. He’s been in Greenwich for seven years and he still abuses crack and alcohol often. When he was in the first stages of his drug addiction he called one day to quit his job and left his apartment to live on the sidewalk.  His main reason for street dwelling: he spent all his money on drugs and stopped caring about anything else.

It looks as if both these men had a choice in their move to the New York City sidewalk, but was the move voluntary? To put this question into context Duneier compares their move to the streets to Hakim’s move to the streets. When Hakim decided to move he was renouncing to the corporate lifestyle. He was renouncing the system even though he was perfectly capable of holding his own within it. When it comes to someone like Ron however, “the use of the term ‘choice’ means accepting something that seems inevitable” (page 43).  Are both of these changes voluntary?

My answer would be no.

The cases of these three street vendors reflect the difference between a choice and a voluntary decision. Sure, everyone can seem to have a choice, but that doesn’t mean that his or her change is voluntary.

I can very well give you the “choice” of whether I should stab you or shoot you. That doesn’t mean you died a voluntary death. Ron was given the choice to either abandon his house or wait to be evicted from it because he couldn’t pay rent. He chose, but his movement to the streets wasn’t voluntary). Ron and Marvin are the Native Americans. Hakim is more like the converts to Islam in the fifteenth century.

Regardless of whether their move was involuntary or not, these men have managed to survive in the streets only because of each other. The rest of chapter two discusses the complex moral support system that has developed in the sidewalk. Such mutual respect and comradeship between these men in the years they have spent together is more of an incentive to carry on than any consequence of the law or frown by the upper class passerby.

“I am thinking about the sidewalk. Thank goodness fro the sidewalk” (page 80).

Pathos and Broken Windows

Have you ever watched a documentary where you feel yourself getting sucked into a story rather than merely absorbing facts? Such is the case with Disney documentaries like African Cats, where every lion, cheetah, and cub has a name and a story. It’s more a narrative than it is an academic film. This is the feeling that took over to me as I was reading the first pages of Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier. Although the book was written as an academic text (as can be clearly seen in the introduction) the stories it tells are enough to make it seem like a narrative. More importantly, these stories give the book a human factor that allows the reader to sympathize with street vendors, in other words: pathos.

Surprisingly, Sidewalk has been told using mainly pathos, rather than the more academic centered logos that I had expected. Since the first page the book started on a pathos infused note by portraying a map before any text. This map shows one main street (Sixth Avenue) and to of the streets that intersect it. Along the street Duneier posted a head shot of every street vendor in his/her spot along with a sentence or two on each vendor’s story. Immediately the book becomes personal and all these “street vendors” become real people to the reader.

Hakim is a street vendor. He was born with the name Anthony E. Francis and (unlike what the stereotype of a street vendor suggests) he went through all four years of college at Rutgers University. In college “he had completed his coursework but never received a diploma” (page 23) because he owed $500 to the university by the end of his senior year. Already I sympathize with his story and I’m only thirty-six pages into the book. According to Duneier, Hakim sees himself as a public figure in the block and has enough insight and knowledge to be considered a mentor. Challenging every stereotype there is for a street vendor of any sort, Hakim has become a mentor for those who stop by his book stand regularly.

Amongst the many who consider Hakim’s insight and advice in their daily lives there is one twenty-two year old man named Jerome who works at The Vitamin Shoppe of the neighborhood. This man has a torn up family and never finished high school. Hakim’s advice? Go back and finish it. This ideal of going back to high school is accompanied by Hakim assigning Jerome books to read and discussing them with him to be sure he understood.

As the book continues more relationships like this are revealed to Duneier who in turn reveals them to me as a reader. I can’t help but be amazed at the insight of a man like Hakim. I admit to have fallen into stereotypical thinking, a realm where every street vendor is there because he has no other choice and where the street vendors who sell books don’t really know much about them.

Hakim decided to go into selling books in the street because he thought it would be an honorable job. Stereotype: shattered.

As I read the book I realized that we all fall for the “’broken windows’ theory “ (page 10).  This theory “holds that minor signs of disorder lead to serious crime (page 10). That’s how the author describes it in the introduction and despite how pathetic it sounds (it is a fallacy after all: the proof doesn’t lead to the conclusion) we all fall for it. “You shouldn’t walk through that neighborhood at night because there are street vendors on every corner.” “You should stay away from that street because it’s full of graffiti.” These are all sentences one might hear in any argument that supports the “broken windows” theory, and though they are clearly fallacious, we fall for it.

As I continue reading the book I expect more stereotypes to be broken and more stories to be told. On top of it all I will be getting constant information on the sociological approach on street life. If this didn’t make me excited for the book I don’t know what could.

Vocabulary:

 Punitive: inflicting or intended as punishment

.

Panhandlers: a beggar who approaches strangers asking for money

CASINO... Buy Them Today

This is the commercial for Casino Cigarettes, the product we (Cristina Angel, Daniel Owen, and me) invented to show fallacies in TV sales today. 

The Script: 

Two kids (look very popular and classy) are smoking in a party (Lana del Rey in the background). One nerdy kid is standing alone in the corner.
APPEAL TO POPULARITY

They approach her.

Boy: You need to try this! Casino made us so popular, now everyone likes us.
TAUTOLOGY

Girl: Yeah, you have two choices here: you can either smoke and be cool like us, or not smoke and be no one (laughs mockingly)
FALSE DILEMMA

Nerd: Wait isn’t it bad for you?

Girl: Oh my god! You have beautiful nails! They’d look even better holding a Casino!
RED HERRING

Boy: Come on, smoke Casino and you’ll be a star.
POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC

**Written at the bottom of the screen: “No reported cases of cancer. We are not unhealthy!!”**
IGNORANCE AS PROOF

The Nerdy kid takes a cigarette and inhales, as soon as she exhales the music starts and everything turns into color. She smiles and they all laugh and walk away together.

The slogan appears on screen: “ALL OF HOLLYWOOD DOES IT… JOIN THE CLUB”
HASTY GENERALIZATION

The Pathos in Gun Reports

The Gun Report: November 13, 2013

By: Joe Nocera

The problem with guns in the United States has been snowballing ever since the school shootings began, and it continues to grow larger as the some people of the U.S.A believe that it should be their right to hold a gun while other’s believe that the idea of guns being sold freely is ludicrous. Lately, all the opinions I’ve heard led to the latter conclusion, and all the arguments make perfect sense. The most eloquent of all these arguments against guns was buried in the opinion area of The New York Times ever since yesterday. Joe Nocera’s “Gun Report” centers itself on pathos to convince people that the free sale of guns in the United States is more dangerous than it is beneficial to each person’s personal protection.

Nocera starts off the article by explaining his own relationship to the free sale of guns. He emphasizes on how impersonal it was for him until not to long ago when a gunshot ended the life of a friend of his. That was when the possession of firearms became a personal subject.

The majority of the article however is not centered around his own experience, but merely quotes reports from various sources, all of them on the same date (November 13, 2013) which show the harm guns can do. These articles span from robberies gone wrong, and attempted murder to suicide and successful murder. In all of them the victims were wounded/killed by a gunshot. This part of the article is important because it focuses on sympathizing with all the other victims of guns in the United States

In the first part of the article Nocera shares his story, making the audience sympathize with him. In the second part he shares other people’s stories, to sympathize with the audience. As if sympathizing weren’t enough, the sheer amount of reports where gunshot wound feature in just one day is enough to amaze anyone, and push them towards his same conclusion: guns shouldn’t be so easy to find and carry.

Nocera doesn’t say much about the reports when he is done listing them, he just gives one statistic to make the amount of damage guns do even more substantial in the reader’s eyes: “an estimated 10,455 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.” (Let’s not ignore the number in bold type here).

If you’re even beginning to doubt that an argument just by pathos works…you should read the comments in the article.

Skilled at Life (?)

Am I skilled at life? Discovery through high school rubrics. 

Three in One

Due to a sad combination of a rather amazing and depressing quality of mine I like to call single minded procrastination and the lack of internet in the middle of Anapoima, I did not complete the blog entries for the memoir we read during October break. I did finish the reading, it was the writing that was compromised by my apparently overtaking need to lie in the sun in fetal position and ignore college applications and other important responsibilities of life. So now without further ado and excuses I present a very late, very lonely, but extensive, three in one blog post about Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Throughout this entire memoir, Winterson keeps a very intense bitter tone about her childhood and her life in general. The psychological issues that come with being adopted, unacceptable in a small community, and utterly lonely in a broken family are strong in her and they are shown slowly throughout the entire book, getting more personal and complicated as she speaks of the more recent time in her life. One lead that accompanies her throughout the retelling of her life is the importance of language and reading as she began to discover who she was and what she wanted to do with her future. The bitterness, the epiphanies about language, and the overall satirical view Winterson takes on the forgotten town of Accrington which saw her grow up make this memoir unbelievably funny, honest, and profound.

The entire book starts with a chapter titled “The Wrong Crib” in which Winterson introduces the whole premise of her childhood as an orphan and the confusion over her adoptive parents. All her doubts are easy to understand; after all, why would someone adopt a child only to constantly tell them they are the “wrong crib”? Why would someone bother to go through the process of adoption only to ignore the child and refuse to love him/her? Later on in the memoir the answer to these questions is presented in the form of a stranded birth certificate for a boy. As it turns out, Mrs. Winterson was supposed to adopt Paul, but that didn’t work out and she was stuck with Jeanette instead. At the start of the story however this information is not disclosed as it isn’t really necessary to understand what Winterson is trying to explain: abandonment and silence. According to her “unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven” (page 9).  This intense feeling of incarceration in her own life brings the author to her first language epiphany: she needed words to escape the silence. 

As the book continues Winterson eventually discusses her sexuality, but one comes to a quick reassessment of the story as soon as she does. This memoir isn’t a story centered on sexuality and coming to terms with it. It is a story centered on what a messed up family and old-fashioned town can cause someone of a different sexuality. Winterson never needed to come to terms with being gay. Winterson never doubted that she was gay. Winterson suffered at the hands of her town for being gay. Throughout her childhood she was disliked and even hated by her adoptive mother, but this gets a million times worse when Mrs. Winterson finds out that she is gay. Once the rest of the town finds out about her sexuality she is exorcized, because clearly a person who isn’t a depressed heterosexual in an unhappy marriage must be possessed by the devil. The irony of it all is that the priest tries to rape her during the final stages of the exorcism in an attempt to convince her that “it would be better than with a girl” (page 81).

Eventually Winterson comes to the second epiphany about language by stating that the main thing literature offers is “a language powerful enough to say how it is” (page 40). This happens shortly after she discovers the library in Accrington and starts her journey through “English Literature in Prose A-Z”. Slowly she begins to create a stash of books under her mattress. Obviously in a house where there were only six books, one of which was the Bible and two of which were commentaries on the Bible, this stash was a problem. As a child, the only literature she had been exposed to was Jane Eyre, but this was corrupted by Mrs. Winterson who changed the story to make Jane Eyre marry the missionary and go off to help him. This shows us just how intent Mrs. Winterson was on keeping her “daughter” within the boundaries of the traditional structure of the town they inhabited. When Mrs. Winterson found the stash she burned all of Jeanette’s books, which leads us to the third epiphany: “Fuck it… I can write my own” (page 43).

I could go on and on about epiphanies in the book. I could write about how in the end Winterson discovers that “creativity is on the side of health- it isn’t the thing that drives us mad” (page 171). I could write about what it means that she calls her adoptive mother Mrs. Winterson throughout the entire memoir and how this indicates the resentment and bitterness she carries inside. I could even talk about her sanity crisis when she decided to look for her birth mother and all the epiphanies she continued to have about writing. I won’t do any of this. Both a literacy narrative and an extremely personal memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is worth reading and I’d rather not spoil more of it than I already have. 

On Being Free Before Setting Yourself Free

When I finished reading Frederick Douglass’s memoir, I came to the conclusion that it can be divided into two main parts: his transformation into a slave and his change into a free man. The idea was given to my by Douglass himself so I can’t take credit for it, but I do believe that this division in the memoir is more important than he made it seem when he mentioned it in passing.

The exact moment where the memoir enters part two is when Douglass fights Covey to the point where the man is scared of him. It is in this moment when he becomes a free man regardless of his position as a slave, in other words, even though he was still “a slave in form, the day had passed forever when [he] could be a slave in fact” (pg. 78) It is at this point in the narrative that we notice a change in Douglass’s passion for freedom. Now he doesn’t just yearn for it, he believes fully in the fact that he deserves it and is confident that he will eventually get it.  Up to this point, Douglass was a slave inside his head as well as by the law.

This idea seems revolutionary to me. The first step towards freedom is, according to Douglass’s experience, thinking of oneself as a free man. It makes sense when considered in perspective from all these years later. Slaves had their inferiority so engraved in their heads that the idea of setting themselves free seemed impossible. It was a mere fantasy because they did not consider themselves free men. Slaves were held captive by themselves as much as they were by their masters. Consider it this way: the ratio of slaves to slaveholders in a plantation was wildly unbalanced toward the slaves’ side. Had they considered the right to be free as something that should be applied to them revolting would have been almost laughably easy.

 In the end slavery was nothing more than a play of power between an aggressive majority and a disenfranchised minority.

It could be said that Douglass was treated better towards the end of the book what with him being able to work for himself and all, but it is easy to understand how this might not be a satisfying arrangement. He was still someone else’s property according to the law. Regardless of the money he saved and the clothes he finally bought for himself, he wasn’t free. Douglass was stuck in a situation where he had the worst of both worlds: the trials and sufferings of a poor free man and the misery of belonging to someone as a slave.

Another interesting issue in the ending of the memoir was Douglass’s refusal to give away the methods he used to escape. On this topic I disagree extensively with Cristina (another blogger in the AP Lang world) and what she mentioned in her last blog post. About this idea of avoiding the escape route details in the memoir Cristina states the following: “I know, he couldn’t just give out the secret recipe for all the freedom-hungry slaves.” I think Douglass’s intention when he didn’t put the route in writing was the exact opposite of that. He wasn’t trying to keep slaves in their place, as an escapee that would make no sense and it would be extremely hypocritical. What he didn’t want was to give the white people the details of the route. He clarifies this when he talks about the well-known Underground Railroad and how it has been so publicly acclaimed that the whites that are looking for an escaped slave know exactly where to go. The open declarations of the Underground Railroad do “nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master” (pg. 100). Douglass kept his route a secret in order to keep white men away from it, not to keep it closed to fellow slaves looking for freedom.

It should also be noted that Douglass gave full names of everyone who helped him get a life once he was in New York, clearly leaving a trail for any escaped slave who arrived to free land with the same confusion as he did. He understood the loneliness and fear slaves might feel when they achieve their freedom. He grasped the “now what?” feeling perfectly and thus he left a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow if they needed help integrating into free lifestyle. A trail that started with a breadcrumb officially known as “MR. DAVID RUGGLES” (pg. 106). Come on, why else would he capitalize the whole thing?

Also important to note is Douglass’s observation that everyone seemed happier in free country. Not only the colored people but whites as well, leaving the reader the distinct feeling that everyone is better off without slavery. In the end, we probably are. Too much power is never good for men.

I say goodbye to this memoir with a quote from Clash of Kings by George R.R Martin, which is extremely relevant to my reflections in this blog post:

“Power resides only where men believe it resides…A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”