Dialectics: diet coke and renewable energy

I do not believe anything I'm about to say, but it's an interesting idea, I think.

Diet coke soothes the conscience of fat people because it let's them think they're doing something about their health.  In reality, coke represents everything bad about the American lifestyle - low cost, readily available, and just awful for you.  We're scared of calories, carbs, and type 2 diabetes.  The American economy solves things like over-consumption not by reducing consumption but by increasing safety - we remove the sugar, put in preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and keep on eating.  This merely eases our heads but doesn't do anything to help the root cause, and so you find people at the movies eating tubs of popcorn covered in artificial butter, twizzlers, and half a gallon of soda - but never fear: it's diet.   We ignore that the artificial sweeteners lead to cancer and get us addicted because we only think about sugar.  

There's no difference with renewable energy - where the energy we use comes from is just a fraction of the problem of over-consumption.  Using alternative energies to reduce our carbon footprint or eliminate our dependence on imported oil merely solves a minor problem on its own not for a noticeable physical benefit but to sooth our conscience.  No longer bound by concerns of dirty energy we keep guzzling everything the energy produces.  Even if you believe 100 percent that renewable energy is a good thing, reject the flawed motives because they don't solve the root cause of the issue and because nothing tastes worse than diet coke.  

Blogging around: Mary and Connor

Mary's blog

Mary wrote about how the large number of extracurriculars high school students are involved in detract from things like homework and sleep:

I liked this post a lot because it's a problem that plagues not just me, but several of my friends as well. I definitely feel that extracurriculars suck up a large portion of time from the day, and when you get back home at 9 o'clock and still have several hours of homework to do, it can be tough. I also notice that when I do well, my parents like to take credit for it. But when I don't do so well, it's something I've done wrong, something I need to fix. But I guess c'est la vie.

I also agree with your point that we create pressure for ourselves. college is looming and it dominates a lot of our thoughts. We need to get good grades to get into a good college to get a good job and make lots of money. That one bad test will ruin our lives because it will lower our gpa. A break from that kind of thinking would be nice, but once again, c'est la vie.

Connor's blog:

Connor wrote about how the roles of business and government are completely different.  Government's power to intervene in the economy should be limited to where they are no longer allowed to take the role of a business:

Yes, I agree that business and government are very different entities. However, I disagree that government should never intervene. There are surely some instances where government intervention is a good thing; You cannot say that the post office, police station, or firemen are bad things. Additionally, there are some places where the free market has failed. To use a current example, over 46 million people lack health insurance because they either can't afford it or get turned down because they have a preexisting condition. I agree with you that businesses do not make good governments. A drive for profit should never be the primary motive for anything in charge of the lives of millions of people. They're just primarily not democracies.

Best of Week: Cathedral

In class this week, we discussed the apparently unsatisfying ending to the short story Cathedral.  The main character finishes the story with a rather bland line, despite him having an epiphany with a blind man in his house.  We talked about how this is particularly fitting for the story because the voice the story has been told with is bland, and thus it would be unfitting to have a miraculous finish to the story.

I agree with the conclusion we reached in class.  Despite the emotional and spiritual grandeur going on inside the main character, he deals with events in a matter-of-fact, blunt, and passive way.  To put together a creative speech that artfully depicts everything that's going on would rob the reader of everything the author had so strived to create in the main character.  So yes, maybe a really cool last line would be nice aesthetically, but the advantages pretty much stop there.  Although, in hindsight, the ending was like a short-sleeve magician; you can see what's coming.

I think that this has massive potential utility for me.  This is a wake-up call to check my story for consistency in voice.  Not only a coherent plot-line, but also a voice that the reader can follow and that adds meaning to the story.  Even if I forget the details of what happens in Cathedral (I probably will), the message will stay with me for a considerably longer time.