Essay #3 Topic

Topic

Health- Cancer- How to cope with cancer

1. Is chemotheraphy necessary?
2. Can diet help?
3. Do Vitamin C and D help?
4. Does everyone have cancer?
5. Will support groups help?
6. How can you ask for help?
7. Is surgery necessary?
8. Have you found the right doctor?
9. Can hair lose be prevented?
10. How does it feel?

The Perils of Indifference

Lindsay Donegan
English 1101
Professor Young

Connections 

There are many connections from Elie Wiesel's speech and Rene Steinke's novel Friendswood.  Weisel says "It is so much easier to look away from victims.  It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work. our dreams, our hopes.  It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair."  This reminds me a lot of what happened to Willa.  After the rape people looked away.  She was sent home from school, to be home schooled, so that the school would not need to 'deal' with her and her 'problems'.  Cully's mom found it easiest to turn her head instead of confronting her son about the rape and his drinking problem.  Some people remain uninvolved.  But by remaining that way, things keep happening. 

Wiesel says "Indifference elicits no response.  Indifference is not a response.  As seen in Friendswood, most people looked the other way instead of seeing the real 'Banes Field'; the toxic waste land they want to build houses on to make money from.  They pretended nothing was wrong.  That the land was cleaned up.  But they saw the people.  The people dying from the chemicals.  Lee was the only one to stand up.  

"What about the children?  Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart.  Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably.  Similar to the Holocaust, the environmental problems in the town of Friendswood are causing people to suffer.  Lee had to watch her only daughter die.  She got sicker and sicker everyday.  The rest of the town just watched.  No one tried to help, not even after her passing.  Only Lee. 

#2

Lindsay Donegan
Professor Young 
English 1101
1/5 

"When is it okay to descend?"

My initial answer to this question was "never."  Because health and money go hand in hand.  Most of the time you cannot have one without the other.  Some people are luckier than others, however.  Some people may only go to the doctor once a year for their annual checkup while some might have to stay weeks at a time.  If someone did not have money how would they pay for their stay?  Insurance certainly plays a role but in a general sense you need money to be healthy.  Whole Foods a health food store, for example, is a very expensive.  A gym membership, too.  This is why most lower class people choose to eat at fast food restaurants.  While that is a cheap, fast, and quick, option it is a silent killer.  Because in time they will gain weight, become obese, and could develop diabetes, for example.  While they do not have any money to take care of themselves.  It is a giant circle.  Because either way is a hard decision.  Do they spend the little money they have on healthier foods?  Well they could be unlucky and get sick anyway.  I could spend all day thinking about these questions.

In my psychology class we were asked the question "Would you rather be lucky or smart?"  Obviously "both" would be the best answer.  Because you can be lucky and win the lottery but not be smart with your money, leaving you with less money than you started with.  This is a common occurrence.  You could be lucky in a health sense, and never develop cancer or be in a car accident.  In this case money was not mentioned.  But if you chose "smart" you could make a lot of money, or do something good in the world. 

In Friendswood, I could see both sides of Mayor Wallen's view.  Initially I saw him as a jerk because he was more interested in the economy than the health of his town's people.  But how could I blame him?  This is why personally I would not want to be in a high position.  I could not make this decision.  Obviously, he has his own immediate family to take care of and wants money to provide for them.  How could he worry about every single individual person?  But then again that is his job, he should not have ran for that position if he could not do so.  His extended family and friends might not live in this town, so health wise they would not be affected by the contaminants.  But on the other side, it is his job to take care of his people as a whole.  It is his decision to prioritize health, wealth, both, or neither.  They chose him.  I keep asking myself "Why prioritize one or the other?"  Couldn't he put the construction of Banes Field of pause, work with the EPA to actually take of his town, focusing on the health of his people, and then build up their economy?  Yes it would take time.  So his term might end before that is complete.  But then he could make sure that the next mayor stuck to the plan.  That would be focusing on the broad picture rather than having immediate income at the loss of many people.  If he continues to disregard the "health" and focuses on the "money" than people might move anyway.  And that would cause him to lose money.  People would keep convincing each other to leave and would not recommend others to buy and move there.  So his whole plan would backfire.  

Reading Log Questions #1

Lindsay Donegan
Professor Young 
English 1101
1/17

Reading Log Questions #1

1. Willa Lambert is an interesting girl from Friendswood, Texas.  It appears that her parents are ashamed of her.  In the beginning she and her dad used to go running on an old golf course early in the morning together.  Only a few people would be out that early so they got a chance to talk.  Her dad would ask what she'd been doing in school, until she might have told him about the things she had seen lately.  Willa had "visions."  Her parents stopped looking at her in the eyes.  "This extra sight was a weird new ability like double-jointedness, come to her late in the summer, but she didn't know if it was real" (Steinke 20).  She had not told anyone.  In a spiral notebook she wrote down a list of all of her visions.  It is possible that she has schizophrenia. 

2. Dex lives in a trailer park with his mother and sister because his parents are separated.  His father lived in Port Arthur.  "Dex doubted any man would love his mother again.  That would be left to Dex and his sister now" (Steinke 39).  Layla, Dex's younger sister was a cheerleader.  Their mother told Dex, "I think it is a shame that you kids don't date anymore, but whatever, same rules I had -- she can't go anywhere where there's boys and no parents.  If she doesn't like that, tough" (Steinke 39).  

Dex knew he had an inside self that was still unfamiliar to him.  He "heard the whisper of it, and kissing Sue Williams, he'd felt it."  "He knew the truth, that he was skinny and unsmooth, prone to getting shit from the football players, just as liable to get laughed at as liked.  Only a girl like Sue could have changed that, taught him the language he needed to talk to that trapped stranger inside himself" (Steinke 40).

3. Hal is a real-estate agent.  "At first he'd done pretty well, sold a big house out on Windsong to an executive at a drug firm, and another one just down the street to a surgeon" (Steinke 13).  But now people rely on the Internet "so his luck got turned.  He no longer felt like the son who'd got the blessing and more like the one who'd been cast out" (Steinke 13).  He needed to pray more.  He needed a clean slate.  Memories of Dawn, a women he had an affair with, haunted him.  The affair "only" lasted seven weeks but it nearly killed him.  "The way he'd come home and feel sad at the sight of Darlene," his wife (Steinke 16).  He had to stop himself.  

Hal felt closest to his son Cully when he watched him play, he'd never been as good a player as his son was. 

5. Lee lost her sixteen year old daughter, Jess, to a rare blood disease caused by chemicals in the environment.  Lee "wanted to be grateful.  After all she'd been through as a kid -- her mom's drunken fits and their sporadic shameful poverty -- she had this nice house, a husband who sang to her, and brought home trinkets he thought she'd like and didn't nag her.  She had a daughter with sweet, curious eyes who liked to tell her jokes and tired to hard to be good" (Steinke 26).  From the beginning Lee has allies.  Lee disagrees with the EPA but no one wants to hear her warnings.

6. Sometime in 2015, Flint, Michigan started making the news.  Headlines showed that high levels of lead where turing up in the blood of children, struggling in the industrial suburb of Detroit.  "Early coverage hewed closely to what had caused the problems in Flint itself—a switch in its water supplies, and the political and cost-saving machinations that drove that decision. But as we’ve learned more, Flint’s travails are yielding much broader implications" (Sellers).  After the switch, residents started complaining about the color, odor, and taste of the water.  A General Motors Corporation even complained about the corrosiveness of the water toward their parts. "It may take months for lead levels to reach a point where the concentrations of all samples are below the action level. Clearly, there is much to be done before the water crisis in Flint is over" (Masten).

7. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established to reverse years of neglect and abuse of the environment and to ensure that government, industry, and the people take better care of nature for future generations.  However, in Friendswood, Texas the EPA does not do their job well.  The town is next to a pollution cite where chemical byproducts were dumped.  They ended up on the land and in the water.  

Works Cited 

Steinke, Rene. Friendswood: A Novel. New York, NY, United States: Hudson Street Press (an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc), 2015. 

Sellers, Christopher. “The flint water crisis: A special edition environment and health roundtable.” Commentary. Edge Effects, 4 Feb. 2016.