The Endless Frontier

I recently read an article (or set of mini-articles) about the must-visit places of 2012 on the New York Times webpage because I was curious to see some of the interesting, exotic places listed.  I saw some pretty cool locations like Panama, Chilean Patagonia, and Tibet.  I also saw some places that I wouldn't regularly expect to be there like Oakland and San Diego, California.  What truly came as a complete shocker, however, was to see both space and Antarctica on the list.

It's true, if you have enough money you can hitch a ride out of Earth's atmosphere to view the planet that has housed the only life humans have ever known from the vantage point of an astronaut.  You can also vacation in frigid, barren Antarctica alongside international scientists and researchers (again, if you have the cash).  Despite the amount of moolah spent on each of these excursions ($200,000 to go to space and ranging from about $8,500 to about $74,000 to visit Antarctica in style), it is pretty amazing that these opportunities are available.

People never want to stop exploring and this is a true testament to that.  If wealthy, yet relatively inexperienced people can go to space, what will regular joes be able to do fifty years from now?  Virgin Galactic, the company that is planning to take flights into space, says it, "will establish its headquarters and operate its space flights from Spaceport America, the world's first purpose built commercial spaceport which is now under construction."  I find it somewhat sci-fi-esque and almost comical that this company would put their headquarters at something called a "Spaceport".  It just seems somewhat surreal.  One of the prominent clients of Virgin Galactic is Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group (go figure) a British-based venture capital company.  On Virgin Galactic's website Branson said, "We are here with a group of incredible people who are helping us lead the way in creating one of the most important new industrial sectors of the 21st century."

Branson is a business mogul, a man whose livelihood is based on capital gain and business expansion.  So I see his point in promulgating a "new industrial sector" in the form of space-based tourism.  Yet I cannot help but look at this enterprise or the affluent business in Antarctica run by White Desert with a bit of cynicism.  With all of the strife and struggle in the world today, why would anyone need to luxuriate in Antarctica's frozen desert or Earth's atmospheric fringes?

It seems to be a constant drive by humans to discover, experience, and feel more.  We're never simply content with where we are, we need something more, and I understand this yearning for adventure due to how I have it myself.  That's actually why it surprised me that both of these companies are primarily British-based; America is more often connoted with being a progressive, next-best-thing type of country.  No matter who innovates first, is it right to constantly advance society for the wealthy demographic while not focusing so much on those who need more basic necessities or should we let those who can and want to do something do what they want?  Or should a healthy balance be struck?                

        

Meta Post

At first thought, I did not think that my blog posts had much progression over the course of our first semester.  At second thought, however, I did see a bit of improvement in my use of evidence and subsequent analysis.  My first inclination in starting to write this post was to look over some of my older posts, and when I looked at my first one, I remembered Mr. Bolos' comment listed below the text.  He wrote regarding my first post (which I at the time thought was my best), "The only thing I would ask for is a specific instance from Assange's actions that your readers could more directly respond to."  The issue Mr. Bolos had with the post was that the evidence was too broad-based and, although the initial thought/argument was strong, what I provided wasn't showing enough empathy for the readers.  I gave an excerpt from the interview with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, the whole video of the interview, and pulled quotes out quotes occasionally.  I did not, however, properly represent with succinct, precise evidence the essential part of my argument.  I needed an example from Assange himself, not just what he said in the video.  This is something that I'm currently grappling with while rewriting a portion of my civil liberties during wartime paper, so it is not an issue that naturally works itself out through practice.  Blogging does, however, catalyze the process of me realizing what I need to work on because it has forced me to frequently construct pieces and as a result I begin to understand my writing better.  


I've always had a lot of trouble with revising my own work because for some reason, my eyes can only correct so much of my own writing before I can't tell the difference between good and bad.  The continued practice that blogging gives has helped me realize my faults in previous pieces and then work on them in later pieces.  For example, in my post about gift returning during the holidays, I struggled with continuing my argument because there wasn't much to write about without a piece of solid evidence in which I could base what I was trying to say.  I searched for some scrap of evidence so that I wouldn't be forced to abandon all that I had written, and by the end of writing the post, I found a somewhat solid example that worked well with what I was trying to say.  I probably needed to use that evidence (or something like it) from the beginning so that I wouldn't flounder so much in the first place.  


My first piece of evidence was, "'I bought some games for my nephew.  I decided I had bought too many.  So I needed to return something,' said a shopper in the news story."  It was not a piece of evidence that could support an argument due to how it was merely stating an obvious, uninteresting quote from some random guy.  My piece of evidence later in the post was from another article and it said, "In Japan, it's customary to give gifts periodically to certain people, such as co-workers, bosses, parents, relatives, teachers, and so on.  These gifts are given to express gratitude."  What I liked about this quote at the time was the fact that the gifts were "given to express gratitude", because it was a  point that I could bring back to American societal customs (as many Americans simply give gifts because otherwise it would be rude.)  All in all from this recent post of mine, I learned that it is important to have a text before beginning to write, so as to avoid floundering while getting the thoughts out into words.


In my most recent post, which directly follows the one from the last paragraph, I tried harder to base my argument on something more concrete.  Although I didn't have evidence set aside before I began writing, I had some great primary source information taken directly from my Aunt Marie, and I knew that I could find some solid evidence about the topic I was discussing once I got to the point in the post.  Nevertheless, the process I underwent in writing the most recent post was a somewhat long one, and it well exemplifies one of my bigger difficulties in writing blog posts: they take me a long time to finish.  In learning from these past posts, perhaps it would be better for me to base my posts in hard evidence I find first instead of finding proof of my argument as I write.  For whatever reason, this has been my natural inclination, and from this point on, I'm going to try and reorder my blog post writing process so I don't take up too much time writing them and can thus finish them on a more regular weekly basis.  


Part of why I originally chose this process to write posts was because I wanted to start writing about something I liked, not just basing an argument off of some piece of boring evidence I find that would work for a post.  Part of this meta post is to analyze not only your writing habits, but your post idea habits as well.  As I looked through my blog posts, I noticed that most, if not all of them, were based off of experiences I had that day or something that I saw on the news.  When I looked further into the posts, however, I noticed that there were a couple of themes that permeated throughout a few seemingly unrelated pieces.  I wrote pieces about people wanting the next best thing, the changing tides of the baseball industry, a changing new, technologically-based generation, and American football becoming more popular in the U.K.  News is based on the idea of progression or change in some way.  If there was nothing changing in the world, we would have no stories to report.  This, of course, is not and will never be the case.  Since I enjoy the idea of hashing out what is in the weekly news through a blog medium, I often write about what the T.V. networks and newspapers are discussing.  That is why some of my posts somewhat reflect the theme of progression, because they are based on the news at the time.  The theme of change or progression was quite prevalent in my earlier writings (all of the aforementioned posts were written in a two month time span.)  Why this is, I don't know exactly, but I do like having a common thread connect a lot of posts and may try to creatively do this in the future.                

A Yankee in the Deep South

I'm fortunate enough to have relatives that are open to discussing many of their past experiences, which really lend themselves to being clear portals into history.  In American Studies class, we've been learning about slavery and what led up to racial segregation in southern states and this coincidentally aligned with a bit of childhood memory that my aunt relayed to me over winter break.  For a little background, my mom's family moved around quite a bit while she was growing up due to her father's line of work, and when her family moved from New York City to Vicksburg, Mississippi, you can imagine that it was quite a culture shock.  It was, by my deductions, akin to that in the film "My Cousin Vinny" where New Yorker Joe Pesci confusedly and hilariously asks, "What's a grit?" in an Alabama diner.

Although my mom in particular wasn't very old when she moved from New York to Mississippi, she did have four older siblings that remember living in the South very well.  One of those siblings is her sister, my aunt Marie, who divulged some old memories she had of Vicksburg to supplement the snapshots I've already gained from my mom.  My Aunt Marie said the southerners made fun of her distinctive New York accent, called her a Yankee, and even proclaimed that the Confederacy won the Civil War as they flew the Rebel Flag, all probably just to spite her.  My mom remembers young, Cajun men coming home at dinner time with knapsacks on their backs, squirrel tails and turtle shells popping out the tops.  People didn't wear shoes; smaller roads were never paved, thick forests encompassed the land directly behind houses.  It's somewhat hard to imagine that this is America in the late 1960s/early 1970s very close in time to when U.S. astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969.  Space travel and turtle soup for dinner, both in America at the same time.  Despite significant differences in society, my mom's family also experienced more significant differences in racial segregation while in Mississippi.

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement was in full force at this time and my relatives have told me that they attended one of the first integrated southern high schools in Mississippi, and the discomfort on the half the southern whites was noticeable.  Aunt Marie recalled with disgust and horror how it was commonplace on the bus for a white to get up and move seats if a black person sat down next to them.

A high school integration that has been most notable in the history books has involved the famously dubbed, "Little Rock Nine" which referred to nine black students who in 1957 chose to attend an all-white, Arkansas high school.  Fights and mobs broke out at the school and then President Eisenhower had to order in troops to protect the black students.  A short video and longer article by the History Channel said, "One of the nine, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, was surrounded by the mob, which threatened to lynch her."  The article also said that Little Rock's mayor actually ordered in troops to keep the black students out of the school to prevent any violence from erupting inside and that this opposition to integration was the staunchest since the Reconstruction Era.   

Mississippi officially integrated their high schools in 1970 (right as my mom's family moved there), but separation still persists.  In Charleston, Mississippi, NPR did a report on the first integrated prom at the local high school.  It was 2008.  While listening to the story, a Charleston High School then-recent graduate said that it's really the parents causing the separated proms.  She recounted a time that a black student wanted to enter the white prom to see some friends and was escorted out of the building.  The white prom, she said, involved the parents more, in that the fathers would dance with their daughters and the mothers with their sons.  What kind of differences do you see between racial tensions today and racial tensions of decades past?  What has changed and why?  Also, how have these racial tensions been charged by societal differences between the South and the North and how has the strength of this charge changed over the years?