The Election

The Election

By Jonathan Morales Rosario

The General Elections of Puerto Rico, the “Island national game”, this event take place, every four years. We have now four different players and each one have played well, some of them have great defense and others have great strategies and offensive, some have a weak point others have great points.

The election in Puerto Rico are going to be really though, we are expecting a battlefield, but I got faith that no matter what Anibal Acevedo, Luis Fortuño, Edwin Irrizary and Rogelio Figuero say the people of Puerto Rico are the ones that have the last word on this matter, we as voters have the right to chose between what is right and what is easy, between what is good and what is wrong. We need to have a team of great mind on the top positions of our land otherwise we can expect four years of the same of the last decades. We could have, hypothetically talking, Acevedo and his team or Fortuño and his team even Rogelio and his team, but we are not going no place if there is no a real UNION within them, there north have to be the greater good for our land and not from them self as individuals and not as a group. Political leaders have to think that we are citizen and stop thinking that we are voters, and they have to think that the day after the elections. Stop thinking that this is a war of three groups: the one that follows the independence, the follow that statehood and the ones who like the way we are know; and start thinking that Puerto Rico need its people to stay, because all the student or the majority of students that graduate leave the country to try to find better opportunities. The problem of the “Political Status” will be a problem that it will be solve, but for know lets try to solve the economical problem, the health problem, and the security and drugs addiction. And for Christ sake stop taking the money of the people that gave you there trust.

Change

Change

By Jonathan Morales

Before the evaluation process that I will try to make on the capacity of Barack Hussein Obama to be the President of the United States of America, we need to know who Mr. Obama is. Barack Obama, is the elected president of the USA, he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii -the first elected president that has born outside of the Continental States-. His parents are Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr... Mrs. Dunham is from Kansas and Mr. Obama Sr. is actually from Kenya. This may sound a little racist, though I will try to make it sound as neutral as possible, his mother is a white American and his father is an African. That makes elected-president Barack Obama a person that is rich on culture, rich on the problems of society and rich on the problems of the world. He lives in the United States, a place filled with the culture of other countries, where African-Americans and white-Americans co-exists among themselves – or actually tries to. The election of this cultural icon is actually the only right decision that the American people have made since the year 2000 -the election of the Republican president George Bush. There is nothing bad about the Republican Party; there have been a lot of presidents that were republicans that did great things like Abraham Lincoln. But the Democratic Party has a tradition when it comes to great presidents like George Cleveland, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter, and we can only hope that Obama honors the greatness of all of the others Presidents of the United States.

Barack Obama comes with an agenda, and his agenda includes working with everyone to make a Change in America and in the whole world; he started this by appointing New York State Senator, Hillary Clinton to be the Secretary of State, prior to that they were running against each other to be the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Now Mrs. Clinton is the Chief of International Diplomacy in Obama’s cabinet. This is a way of telling everyone in the US and the World that the government of Barack Obama is going to be a government of union. One of the first things that the former Senator of Illinois has done since he was elected president is to try to establish a common ground to try and do the best for the country. He was at the White House with President Bush in a meeting where they established trust to work together in the transition of the government. In the primary, he established communications with other countries in the world. He came to Puerto Rico and promised a process of self determination, and when the Puerto Ricans know what they want to do, he will make the opinion of the Island count in Congress. He established “friendship” with the Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

I got a lot of faith in Barack Obama, even though we in the Island can’t vote for the President of the United States and there are 50 states and other territories on the Union that have more priority over us. I know that there is an on-going war on terrorism in the world. I know that there are problems with the health system. I know that there is a problem in the petroleum industry. I know that there is Global Warming. I know that there are a lot of problems that come before the status of the Puerto Rico. I also know that the whole world is in a process of recession. But I believe that he is like us, a young African-American with 47 years of age that knows that there is a need of Change in the world and he will try to make it happen.

The Common Fight

The Common Fight
By Jonathan Morales Rosario

The common fight, there are things that the Puerto Rican “ Jibaro” has been fighting since the Island was a colony of the Spanish Empire and the Spanish conquistador, that is the identity. The Puerto Rican has a need and a right to feel his or her identity, because we are proud of the mix of races that we have: the Spaniards, the Indians and the Africans, this mix makes the Puerto Ricans an even prouder race. Who we are and where are we going? That is a question that the Puerto Ricans have in mind always. We know the answer of one of them, we are Puerto Ricans but we don’t know where we are going. I put the title of common fight because we have an internal fight amongst our people. Every four years we fight for what we think is right, for what makes us proud and for our identities. Politics, an event that changes the history of the “Jibaro”; puts families in position to fight, makes people lose their jobs, helps other people get jobs and makes people go mad. In the quest for our identity we have created political parties, these political parties have become what we were trying to find and this is bad, because now we are like three tribes, each one trying to control the other two. Between the disagreements that the main political parties have in the island, we can say that they have a common fight which is not ideological, but we can say that they are both looking for the progress of Puerto Ricans. We have had bad leaders in both parties and there has been good leaders in La Fortaleza from both parties trying to seek out a common identity between the people, uniting the people and trying to work as one, even though we know that there are more than one. We know that the focus of the political fight that we see in the streets, the senate and almost everywhere in the Island are based on the political status - Where are we going? -, we need to step aside of this matter and star to look at the important things that need the attention or more attention. Things that need attention such as the economical problem that the Island is facing, the educational problem and the social problem; these are things that are going from bad to worse in the Island. We are now facing a national recession that puts Puerto Rico in a really bad position; the educational situation is worse every day, the students aren’t learning anything, and socially we are so bad, last week a man killed his’ wife and cut her entire body up and put the pieces in baskets, what kind of psychopath can do something like this. I believe that we need to refocus on what is important to us as people, as “Jibaros”, as Puerto Ricans and forget, for the moment, about political issues and start working as a team no matter what is your color or your political party.

The Death Star and the Twin Towers

The Death Star and the Twin Towers

In my quest of trying to do this journal I was practically frustrated, because I haven’t found I theme that I really liked to work on. Actually I decided to saw a film instead of doing it, because I didn’t really understand the model of argumentation. Then I started to see a movie called Clerks, this film isn’t a great film with all the aspects of an Oscar winning film, but is a little film that makes you think in a lot of things differently.

The events of the film that I am going to be talking of are: one scene, were the two main protagonists were arguing over the “Death Star Employees”. One of the protagonists is Dante, the guy who wants to move on and have a life and the other is Randal, a guy that is kind of happy with his life. The argument that they were using was, whether or not the employees on that construction of the second Death Stat deserved or not to die. One of them was claiming that yes, because they were working to the evil Empire and they deserved what happened to them. Later a man enters the store were Dante works and said that the workers of the Second Death Star were constructer workers, mainly sub-contracted by the Empire to reconstruct the Death Star and they were trying to do their job to bring food to the tables of their homes. These workers have nothing to do with the Empire or the Emperor evil plans of destroying everything that could overthrow the Galactic Empire. But this is just a speculation, but this makes me think on the Twin Towers and the fact that we only see things in a macro perspective. The workers of the Twin Towers have nothing to do with the actual president administration, but the Twin Towers were representing the economical power of the actual administration. So we could say that the Twin Towers were like the Second Death Star also that the terrorist were like the Rebel Alliance and Bin Laden is like Luke Skywalker.

I am not saying that Bin laden is a hero; I really believe that he is a coward. Skywalker is a guy that have a motive and the first time that he destroy the Death Star he was aware that it was a military position and all the people that were in the base were military personal and military personal such as soldiers were aware of the risk of working on a military base, it can be attack at any time. The Second Death Star is a little different scenario, is a military base that was on construction and not all the personal that was working there were military personal, but the Emperor himself was inspecting the final stages of the construction of the Second Death Star. Yet again, the Second Death Star was a military base and if you work at a military base, you have to know that there is a risk that you could be killed at any time. Like I said before, Bin Laden is a coward, because the Twin Towers were not a military point and he wasn’t even there.

I know that Clerks is a comedy I think that the film have a lot to say, is one movie that you can see it 4 or 5 time and you will find something new. Like the Star Wars Original Trilogy, I have seen it so many times that I can even act every single scene.

References.

Lucas George, Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope, (1977)

Lucas George, Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi, (1983)

Smith Kevin, Clerks, (1996)

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web

By Jonathan Morales

The theme that I like the most was the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks*

With this invention we can say that the world is “united” not only by sharing information between the hyperlinks -is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of a (different) domain*-, but by communities themselves, we can interact with people in real time and instantly. This happens thanks to Windows Messenger, AOL, Facebook, Myspace and others service that World Wide Web provides us so we can talk with our love ones. More recently, the World Wide Web “attacks” the youth and the not so young, this happened when the video game companies starts to looked at the internet access as part of the in-game experiences, developing a concept where two or more people can play and interact at the same time, but not in the same console: the split screen system, the first steps to Xbox Live and Playstation Network –PSN- . Now the online experience is the next best thing. Maybe in a near future, kids around the world won’t have to go to a video game store to buy a full game, because he or she can buy it at home.

Video sharing with YouTube, this is something great. If you want to see something now you can see it, this is much better than MTV or TiVO. The only thing that isn’t so great about it is that if this is the way that things are going to work for now on, there is not going to be a lot of face to face communication and yet again is the world really “united” then. But that is not all; there will a lost sensibility to the print material. There will be no kids in the world that will read something or anything, because the like to read, they are going to do it just because they have to. The only thing that people read now is the instructions. There is something that is related to this that I used in class, when we have to read something for a class, we can have access to a good summary and make a nice work, just like the person who buy the book, now, we are taking the chance of not knowing the whole story and in the exam we could fail.

This are some of the examples of why we most have a balance and do the face to face talk, we can sign in to Windows Messenger and other things in the World Wide Web and in the “real” World. There is only one fact that we have to accept, the world is evolving. There are so many thing that we ca do now days and there are a lot of things that we are going to be doing in a near future – in the technological topic -. Within a simple idea we find a big and complex world that is really “united” by this invention of the World Wide Web, but is not united in the humanitarian style, all the time we can see people is less human and more like a machine.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric

As of the discussion in class, Rhetoric is the art or the way to persuade and person or people of a certain line of thoughts. We can also describe Rhetoric as the power of convincing and as of proving some facts with supporting evidence; there is no way that we can prove something with out evidence, there is only faith, but that isn’t what we are looking for with rhetoric, were the main goal is persuade the audience on something.

There are three types of rhetorical discourse that we still use now days: Legal Speech which stands for the art of convincing the audience of the innocence or the guiltiness (example. Lawyer, Judge, Jury, Defendant- the lawyer try to prove to the judge and the jury that the defendant is innocent by using the power of the rhetoric and the Rhetorical Appeals. The defendant seeks to prove that he is innocent and he uses the lawyer as a “tool” that will help him to achieve his goal. The judge and the jury listen to the appeals of the lawyer, this is done to find the truth of either the defendant is innocent or guilty, it all depends on how the lawyer and the defendant use the legal speech) The second one is the Political, this discourse is the most common all now days( political campaigns and elections). This discourse stands for the art of persuading people to, in a democracy, vote for them, because they are the best choice of all.(Politics try to “destroy” there adversaries in an “Oral War” or a “Discourse War” and always the “stronger Speaker” tends to win the “War” that happens every four years) The last of the discourse is the Ceremonial, this type of discourse is the art of the religions of convincing that the other religions are not so good and that their religions are the “Way” to whatever the stand for. The three types of discourse have one thing in common; they try to persuade the audience.

To achieve the goal of persuasion, Plato, Aristotle, Gogias, Cicero and Quintilian were the key people on the field of the development of the art of persuading audience. The most important of them is Aristotle whom invented or came with these Appeals, this appeals are: Pathos that is the Ancient Greek word for the Emotional; Logos that is the Ancient Greek word for the Rational; and Ethos that is the Ancient Greek word for the Ethical or the Moral. Aristotle used these appeals to convince more effectively. This is done by knowing and analyzing your audience to using the perfect appeals in any giving situation. The use of the emotional appeal comes from that, the emotions the bond of the Speaker and the Audience, and what they may have in common like: ethnicity, sexuality, religion, political opinion, sickness and any other situation that maybe describe as the right of the human to be free and equal. An example of this can be Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” were he address to an audience with his same problems and to the ones that were making there life so miserable. The second is the rational, the rational stands for is the most logical way of doing something or “Star Trek’s Mr. Spock” would say “there is a logical explication for that”, because it refers to the reason and the evidences. And the last one is ethical; this one stands for what is right and the moral behavior of the human beings.

There also other example of what rhetoric is; in the ancient world the Epicureans and the Stoics were groups of philosophers that argue about almost every single thing, but they were doing this in a diplomatic way. Their meetings took place on the highest court at the Areopagus, the Areopagus was the place were men went to discourse important matters like religion, politics and laws (rhetorical discourse), and only the greatest minds of the time were invited to be on the seasons.

Now day we got rhetoric in everything, the ads, the television, the news paper, the cell phone and the Internet; people trying to convince people to believe or to “buy” every single thing. We have the 1-800-call-fast with the “miracle products”, another example the political ads on the TV and the news paper; or the “buy your salvation”, and the Internet that has it all and some how people with can’t imagine a day with out the most revolutionary invention of the last century, maybe it would stop the world or it could send us back to the Stone Age.

But that is what rhetoric is all about, call it the power of persuade, to convince or some how “buy” the audience, by employing carefully the right words and constructing great speeches that can change the face of the planet, like President George W. Bush’s Patriotic Act for example.