Narrative Final Draft

Drunk Driving

            Looking through the shattered windshield, all I could think about was my mother.  I don’t know why she came to mind, I can only guess it was because I knew how angry and heartbroken she would have been had I died.  I looked over at Eli in the driver’s seat, he was okay, and then back at Emmett, he was okay too.  Then all at the same time Eli’s profanities hit my ears, I felt the tan clothed roof pressing down on my head, and the warm liquid slowly working its way down the back of my neck, into my shirt, and down the length of my arm.  My window had broken, and a few pieces sat on my lap.  The cold winter air brushed against my face, giving me the chills.  It was one of those cold, clear, windless nights; about 10 below.

I looked back through the windshield, trying to get an idea of where we had landed.  It was a field.  I looked behind us through the crushed port that used to contain the rear windshield, and was astonished by the distance between the road and our twisted metal heap.  I shook my head and tried to remember how we had gotten here.

It was the day after Christmas in my senior year of high school.  We were all excited about the gifts we had received, especially the money, and there was no stopping us from celebrating.  We splurged that night and got Bombay Sapphire, none of that cheap liquor we always had to drink to save money.  Gin and tonic with lime.  I had the big cup that night, and I was pretty pleased with myself.  A “bro night” if there ever was one, we played drinking games late into the night and eventually Jonas, the host went to bed complaining about working for his father in the morning.  Eli, Emmett, and I stayed awake with our eyes glued to the television set and Halo 3.

I do not know how, but we managed to agree that drunk driving was a good plan; not for any particular purpose other than to drive drunk and have a crazy time.  Eli would drive us and we would all wear our seatbelts.

We got in the car.

            It was cold when we first got in, but not too bad.  I knew it would warm up.  We pulled out of the driveway and began down the road.  We were pumped up and Eli began accelerating.  The roads were not in good condition to begin with.  Maine is not exactly known for its smooth roads, and this was a prime example.  Appleton, Maine has the worst roads in the county; the fastest you would ever want to go on them is about 50 miles per hour on a good day.  Today was not a good day.  It had been raining all day, and when it rains in Maine in the winter, the water freezes.  In my experienced opinion, “freezing rain” is by far the most dangerous precipitation out there.

            The rain comes down from the sky, and because of the subzero temperatures, freezes the instant it comes into contact with any solid object, including roads.  We had gotten about a quarter of an inch of rain that day, and that meant a quarter inch of ice on the roads.  A quarter of an inch of ice on the roads turns them into a veritable ice rink.  You get almost zero traction, making sliding a serious and dangerously common possibility.

            We sped down Appleton Ridge Road going faster and faster.  Eli’s SUV had horrible acceleration and by the time we reached the crest of the hill, we were going only about 60mph.  As we began our descent the car lifted slightly, as our upward momentum fought the downward force of gravity, and the pressure from the tires on the road lessened.  This lapse in pressure was enough to set the car free of the static frictional force that held it in place, and we began to drift to the right.  Eli sensed this and swerved to the left to avoid going off the road.  We began drifting left now, and he swerved back right, drastically over compensating.  There was a big bump, and then a sort of weightless feeling.  I have a snapshot of the still intact windshield with an upside down world beyond, forever burned into the bedrock of my mind.  I barely knew it, but I do remember thinking the words, “We’re rolling right now.  This is actually happening.”  Then we stopped.

           

            I jolted out of my recollecting daze, and looked back at Eli.

            “Are you alright?” I asked.

            “Yeah, I think so. Are you okay, Emmett?”

            “Yeah I’m okay,” Emmett replied.  “Did that just happen?

            “Yeah it did,” I answered.

            We got out of the car and for a few minutes attempted – in our drunken stupor – to get the vehicle going again, so we could drive back to Jonas’ house.  It of course did not work and soon we began a long, cold walk back.

            We all later found out how extremely lucky we were to have walked away so unscathed.  No one was ever able to determine how the cut on my head had been made, but I did test positive for a major concussion and had to sit out of school work for three weeks.  Other than my concussion though, there was not even a single scratch anywhere on any of us.

            The police came to Jonas’ at around 3am.  Someone had seen the twisted metal lump and reported the accident.  They add 0.02 to your blood alcohol content for every hour that passes after an incident, so when Eli blew a 0.16, the police recorded that he had had a BAC of 0.20 at the time of the accident.  He was eventually charged with an OUI (operating under the influence is the same in Maine as driving while intoxicated is in New York), driving to endanger, and leaving the scene of an accident.  The officer skipped the breathalyzer and instead gave Emmett and I sobriety tests, which we passed, and so the police have no record that we were ever drinking, and Emmett and I were never charged with anything.

            The wreck was carried on the back of a flatbed to a junkyard in the next town over.  The three of us got together two days later and went to see it.  One of the scariest thoughts to me is that when the man behind the counter let us into the yard, and we were searching for Eli’s more than totaled SUV, we actually walked right past it.  Not even Eli recognized the remains of his old car.  The guy stopped us and pointed to a big green metal barrel, and asked if maybe this was the car we were looking for.  We gawked.  It was indeed Eli’s car.  The bright yellow “Share the road” sticker on the back told us that, but there was no other resemblance to the vehicle in which we’d taken so many joy rides and balmy summer cruises.
            We looked around the car for a few minutes, each inspecting the area around the seat we'd been sitting in.  Outside of my door there was a big round rock that I would estimate weighed about 600 lbs.  I asked the worker why this big rock was sitting so close to the car, and he told me exactly how lucky we all were to be alive.
            "When your car went off the road the front right wheel caught in a ditch, and forced the car to start rolling.  You rolled 8 times before landing on an old rock wall.  This rock was lodged in the front right wheel well.  You guys are all very lucky you landed right side up; if the car had landed upside down I doubt I'd be talking to any of you."

            4000 teens die every year in alcohol related car accidents (Teenage Drinking).  We escaped with our lives, but that does not mean everyone will.  I'm sure you have heard it a thousand times by now, but the best way to ensure that you will not die in a drunk driving accident is to just not put yourself in that situation.
            You've heard the phrase "friends don't let friends drive drunk," and that's the best way to prevent accidents.  All it would have taken is one of us to mention how miserably stupid of an idea it was to go driving that night, and it never would have happened.  An article published by a research group out of the University of Michigan lead by Jean T. Shope, Ph. D., a research professor at the University of Michigan, cites peer pressure and friends' support of drinking as the main causes for teen drunk driving (Shope).  Surely if peer pressure can cause teens to drink and drive, peer pressure can do just the opposite. 
            Eli, Emmett and I were lucky, very lucky.  We easily could have been among those 4000 dead teens, but somehow we made it out with our lives.  Don't do what we did; chances are, you won't be as lucky.  If you think one of your friends is planning on driving home or joyriding like we did after having a few drinks, tell them how uncool and dangerous it is.  No one wants to do something that they know their friends don't want them to do.  Peer pressure can get kids in trouble, but it can also save your friends' lives.





Works Cited:

Shope, Jean T., Trivellore E. Raghunathan, and Sajuta M. Patil. "Examining Trajectories of 

            Adolescent Risk Factors as Predictors of Subsequent High-risk Driving Behavior." Journal of 

            Adolescent Health. 24 May 2002. Web. 10 May 2011.

 

"Teenage Drinking and Driving." Alcohol Solutions. Web. 10 May 2011.

Reflection 3.2

Finding a scholarly source was exceedingly challenging for my topic.  Most publications concerning marijuana's health effects and such never made it onto the internet, and since that was my primary mode of research, it took some work to find what I was looking for.  Most of the comments I received on my short first draft asked me to find sources, so my revision consisted mostly of that.

Reflection

I couldn't think of a good topic to write my essay on, so I copped out and decided to write it on marijuana legalization.  I know a lot about the subject already, and the hardest part is finding a way to compromise.

Rogerian First Draft

I understand where you are coming from.  Marijuana has been illegal for decades, and it has been associated almost exclusively with losers and hoodlums.  You believe that no good can come of cannabis legalization, because it turns users into “pot head” abusers.  This possibility is in arguable.  I have seen many fellow students fall into some condition comparable to addiction.  The ability the plant has to change one’s life goals from success and respectability to a simple longing for an artificial endorphin release is certainly present, especially in young people.  Another association marijuana has in many minds is that of a “gateway drug.”  This too, is undeniable.  Marijuana’s effects on one’s consciousness often lead a user to desire something stronger and more exciting.  There is no reason why you should not find this fault in the drug.

But, there are also no reasons why you should find any other faults in it.  Although marijuana can become far too important to youngsters and weak minded individuals, it is not physically addictive, like cocaine or heroin or cigarettes.  Marijuana has never been linked to either brain or lung damage or to any kinds of cancer.  In fact, medicinal marijuana had been being prescribed by licensed doctors for over 20 years to dull the pain and effects of certain types of cancer.  Cannabis is not used solely by losers going nowhere, although there are certainly a lot of loser users out there.  You cannot overdose from marijuana consumption, and so it has never been the cause of death on any death certificate.  “Weed” is most definitely more potent today than in its “flower power” hay day, but because the active ingredient in it (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) is so harmless, this is somewhat of a moot point.  Disabled-world.com, a website dedicated to aiding disabled people and distributing information to the benefit of the physically and mentally disabled, even goes as far as to say, “Marijuana is one of the most beneficial and therapeutically active substances known to man” (Disabled World). 

Works Cited

"Medical Marijuana for Pain and Depression." Disability News, Information and Resources - Disabled World. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. <http://www.disabled-world.com/medical/pharmaceutical/marijuana/>.

Rebuttal Reflection

Sources for my essay were impossible to find, let alone think of.  Very little of my argument could have really used a source as evidence.  Most of the facts I discussed were solely observations I've made in school and at home.  It was quite challenging to tie my two parts of the essay together.  My refutation of the Lufkin Daily News' base warrant had very little to do with my counter argument, and so I had to kind of force them together.  Not my best paper ever.

Essay 2.2 again

Huck Finn: High Schools Need it, Others Don't

            An editorial, published on January 6^th by the Lufkin Daily News out of Lufkin, Texas, discusses the virtues of replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in new versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to be released by an Alabama publishing company in association with a “Mark Twain scholar” (paragraph 1).  The main reason behind the Lufkin Daily News’ support for the new versions of the Twain novels is that “schools… are simply not assigning it to students anymore” for fear of the word being used in classrooms (paragraphs 2 & 3).  We read the book when I was in high school, so which schools are no longer assigning Huckleberry Finn to students? The editorial offers an answer: elementary schools.  Since elementary schools should not be assigning Huckleberry Finn anyways, and from my own experience I can tell you that high schoolers are capable of being mature about the word, there is no need for an edited version of either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn to be published.

The Lufkin Daily News suggests that “the surest way to make kids use the word inappropriately is to tell them not to use it inappropriately” (paragraph 3).  How old are these “kids?”  No elementary schooler is mature enough to handle the frequent use of the word “nigger” appropriately, but no elementary schooler is mature enough to explore hardly any of the concepts Twain seeks to display in Huckleberry Finn, let alone understand them.  Why then, does the Lufkin Daily News boldly state that the edited version is appropriate “for the lower-level grades” (paragraph 3)?  Elementary school students are not ready for any of the deeper meanings found in Huckleberry Finn or the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and since the obvious goal of censoring these works is to prompt elementary schools to begin assigning these books as required reading, the books should certainly be left just as they are, so as to keep children from reading a book they simply cannot fully understand.  A fifth grader may know what the definition of the word prejudice is, but they cannot yet grasp the concept of it.  That is, unless they’ve been raised in a racist or otherwise prejudiced household, in which case the word, “nigger” is almost certainly not new to them.

            Maine, the state where I grew up, has one of the most isolated and exclusive cultures in the country.  In order for a person to be considered a real “Mainer” unless their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all lived and died in Maine, and worked in some trade like carpentry, painting or lobstering.  No outsiders.  No exceptions.  They are legally able to marry cousins and so inbreeding isn’t at all unheard of, and yes, I have met some of them before.  They are quite ugly.  Mainers have isolated themselves so well from the rest of the world that a Mainer accent, something I thankfully do not possess, has hardly changed in the past few centuries.  The change has been so small in fact, that a Mainer accent is regarded by linguists as bearing the closest resemblance in the world to the way people spoke in around the time our country was founded.  I am acquainted with multiple families that have lived on the same property in the same house since the late 1860s, around the time when many Mainer families moved there.

Maine is the whitest state in the US, and by that I mean that only about 5% of the people currently living in Maine are not white.  Even Ithaca College is a bit of a culture shock to me.  There is one other prerequisite to being a Mainer though, and after what you have just read it should make a lot of sense.  You have to be white.  You see, the reason for the late 1860s migration, and why you have to be white, is because for a Mainer, racism runs just as deep as family and tradition.  That is why Maine has the highest Ku Klux Klan membership of any of the fifty states (dsjfgsd).

In high school, Huckleberry Finn was one of the books I was required to read for my tenth grade American Studies course with Mr. Doubleday, a funny middle aged bald man with a glorious red mustache.  As he was handing out copies of the book, we talked about ground rules for how class discussions would go, and what appropriate use of the word “nigger” was for that class.  A third of the students (the Mainers) laughed at the idea that “nigger” was not the best way to refer to a black person, and as the classes went by, their use of the word in and out of class skyrocketed.  One day we came into class and someone had written “I hate niggers” on the whiteboard.

I can say in all honesty, that reading that word over and over and over again, as Huckleberry referred to Sam as a “nigger” so casually, only made me hate the word more, and I was not alone.  I know I said that about a third of the class were prejudiced redneck bastards, but the rest of us were all pretty normal, and with every iteration of the word our disdain for it was solidified.  We were all sixteen, and despite the horrible language in and unfortunately out of the book as well, we were able to be mature and responsible about the word’s use.  I’m glad we were too, because I do not think that our experience reading Huckleberry Finn would have been the same, had Huckleberry referred to Sam as “slave.”

The word “slave” does not carry the same connotation of ignorance as the N-word does.  Had our class read a version of the novel in which every “nigger” had been replaced with “slave,” our appreciation for the story and our submersion in it would not have been as complete, and we would have gained far less from the reading of it. 

            The censorship of the N-word from Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer is wholly unnecessary.  The Lufkin Daily News’ support of such censorship is based on the false assumption that elementary school students should be reading Huckleberry Finn for class.  Elementary school students are nowhere near mature enough to handle the themes explored in Twain’s novel, and if keeping “nigger” in the books keeps them from reading it, there should not be any problem.  The censorship of the word only endangers those older students whose schools might have purchased to more politically correct version and assigned it in place of the original.  These students will be deprived of valuable learning and understanding of our nation’s cultural past, and therefore, this edited version of Huckleberry Finn should not be published.




Work Cited:
 

"Huck Finn: Censorship? Sure, It Is, but Changes to ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Are Warranted." Lufkin Daily   News, 26 Jan. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://lufkindailynews.com/opinion/editorials/article_db4061d4-193f-11e0-9991-001cc4c002e0.html>.

Prewriting Essay 3

Well I was going to right a response to Amy Chua's article, but since we just read one I feel like that would be a bit of a cop out, so I have to find a new topic.

Why grace is the worst woman ever...

No ideas. No ideas. No ideas. No ideas. (Set to the tune of Black & Yellow by Wiz Khalifa)

Documentation Quiz

1. We use MLA format in this class

2. Papers need to have a "Works Cited" page

3. A web citation needs to have the name of the author of the article, the publication date of the article, the date the article was accessed, the URL of the article, and the article's title.

This Won't Convince Me:

A Rhetorical Analysis Of “Government should create stricter gun laws”

By Parker Swayze

Megan Weintraut's argument "Government should create stricter gun laws" was published with commendable timing, and that is possibly its most persuasive element.  Published on Janurary 26^th, less than three weeks after the shooting of nineteen innocents in Tuscon, Arizona, the article seeks to convince every American old enough to vote, and I suspect that most Ithacan readers do not own a gun.  A vigorous attempt is made at establishing a logical aspect of the argument, but this is rendered rather useless when examined by even a mildly informed reader.  There is no attempt made to establish any sense of credibility whatsoever, and this inattention by the author is rivaled only by her almost total lack of acknowledgment and response to the opposing view.  Because of these attributes, Weintraut's essay is far less effective than it could have been.
Her article couldn't have come at a better time though: published only eighteen days after the attempted assassination of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, that left thirteen wounded, and six dead.  The occasion was ripe, and she took advantage, pulling on the heartstrings of every parent with a child enrolled in school when Weintraut mentions the shootings at both Columbine and Virginia Tech.  The pathos stops there though, and the author begins to lose sight of her audience. 
She wastes an entire paragraph explaining why American citizens no longer require guns in order to obtain food for their families.  Every reader already knows that they can just walk into a supermarket and buy a piece of meat; there is no need to reinform us.  Another point she makes without considering her audience is that 68 percent of murders in 2006 involved a firearm.  As an American who does not own a gun, this little fun fact really only makes me want to go buy one so as to protect myself from all the potential gun-owning murderers.
Weintraut does well citing the second amendment though, as it is the most referred to text in the argument against gun control.  She acknowledges the text, and discredits it with a brief discussion of the outdatedness of "maintaining a well-regulated militia" in the modern United States.  This, however, is where both her acknowledgment and response of the opposing view ends.  The purpose of her argument is not that government should make stricter laws regulating the production, distribution, or sale of guns, but rather that government should enact laws making bullets harder to acquire.  It comes across as though she feels that she found some exploitable loophole in the second amendment.  Since bullets are to guns, as food is to human beings, it is hardly reasonable to presume that putting stricter limitations on bullet production, distribution, or sales would fall out of the broad umbrella of precedents concerning the second amendment.  Weintraut's opposition would certainly show too, that the regulation of bullet sales would only create a secondary or "black" market for such commodities; the prices on this new market would be cheaper, as well would be the quality, and the numbers of gang-related homicides involving firearms would almost certainly rise, not fall.  Weintraut’s argument does not account in any way for this seemingly obvious rebuttal.
Which brings me to my next topic of discussion: the author's use of logos, or logical appeals in the article.  Weintraut writes in her article that "90 percent of today’s gang-related homicides involve guns" of some sort (paragraph 3).  The very first thing that came to mind upon reading that statistic, was that less than 10 percent of the guns used in gang-related homicides are acquired legally.  What seems like a staggering fact at first, seems relatively moot once you realize that "stricter gun laws" would have an almost negligible impact on these statistics.  I'm all for the use of logical appeals in an argument such as this, but the relevancy of this piece of evidence just isn't quite there.  In another part of the argument, Weintraut proposes that media is having a negative effect on the way children view violence.  First I have to ask, in what way is this relevant to creating stricter gun laws?  Second, one of the ways she supports this claim, is with the statement, "...the popular video game Grand Theft Auto rewards players for murdering law enforcement” (paragraph 4).  This is just plain false.  Again, I think logic is a great way to go about this argument, but use facts that are actually true.

The argument Megan Weintraut makes is well timed, but clearly not fully thought out.  She makes some good points, but leaves them open to easy rebuttal by her opposition.  Her use of logos also falls far short of what a reader would expect.  For these reasons, her argument is not an effective one.

Reflection 1.1

I don't feel like there's really a whole lot to reflect on.  I just sat down in the library on the 4th floor, got the document up on a window, and started writing about it.  Nothing more to it than that.  No prewriting, no planning.  I just wrote my first draft.

I guess the only things I really plan on doing with my second draft are to put the terms into my paper more explicitly, and add a conclusion.