QTPC 18-When the Levees Broke

Quotation: “…I don’t know why God didn’t just let me die, because I got nothing to live for.”

Talking point: I’m sure that many people said this quote to themselves at one point during this disaster. Most people lost their house or a loved one. This certainly took a psychological toll on them and had them wondering why this was happening. To them, dying was better than living though this hell.

Connection: I made a connection with Maus during this portion of the documentary. This portion of the documentary showed how chaotic things got after the hurricane had left. People were cramped in an airport and a convection center, just like the Jews during the Holocaust were cramped in small shelters during their stay in the concentration camps portrayed in Maus.

QTPC 17-When the Levees Broke

Quotation: “Usually disasters bring out the best, and that’s what we expected to see. But this is bringing out the worst.”

Talking point: I remember watching the news during Hurricane Katrina just days after the storm hit, and while the women was interviewing an officer, a couple looters walked in the background carrying  a flat-screen TV and a game system. We saw other cases in the documentary of looters taking unnecessary items out of stores. It got me wondering why people would do this. Is it because they’ve never had the opportunity to have these expensive things in their lives, so now they feel that because others are looting, they have the right to take these items? I understand looting water, food, clothing, diapers, etc. but not the electronics.

Connection: I made a connection with Savage Inequalities during this section of the documentary. Part of the city (like St. Bernard Parish) reminded me off the ghettos that Kozol described in his book. In both cases we see how the people living in these sections were completely ignored.

QTPC 16-When the Levees Broke

Quotation: “When an engineer makes a mistake he is damned because it is there for the world to see.”

Talking point: The documentary mentioned Hurricane Pam, a hypothetical hurricane that FEMA used for a disaster scenario. While Hurricane Pam was only a category 3, it still brought a lot of damage to New Orleans, like the destruction of over 500,000 buildings and severe flooding. The major difference between Hurricanes Pam and Katrina is Pam’s storm surge topped the levees, while when Katrina hit, the levees broke forcing the water into New Orleans. 

Connection: I made a connection between these events and events that occurred in my hometown back in 2o06. In September of 2006, we had a substantial amount of rain in a short period of time throughout northwest Indiana, particularly in Highland and Griffith. The levees on the Little Calumet River (borders the north side of Highland) were still in the process of being built, so there was nothing to stop the water levels from rising. The entire north side of Highland was flooded up to the roofs of one-story houses, and some houses collapsed due to the pressure of the water outside of the house.

QTPC 15-Savage Inequalities (133-237)

Quotation: page 174 “Is it possible that the defendants in these cases do not sense the irony of spending so much money to obtain the services of experts to convince the court that money isn’t the real issue? These contradictions do not seem to trouble them at all. But do they really ask us to believe that laws of economics, which control all other aspects of our lives in this society, somehow cease to function at the schoolhouse door? Do they think poor people will believe this?

Talking point: On pages 155-156 we see Chilly talking about a time when her counselor told her she couldn’t be a lawyer. If the counselors don’t have faith in the students, how can we expect the students to believe in themselves?

Connection: I made a connection with Maus and how Kozol depicted the classroom setting in Savage Inequalities. Kozol shows us how some schools run out of space and are forced to have classes inside storage closets, bathrooms, and eat lunch in a boiler room. These settings reminded me of the places Art had to hide from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Extra Credit 10-8-09

Helena Maria Viramontes gave a lecture to at the Stewart Center. She read a couple passages from some of her works of literature. Her writings are heavily influenced by her childhood: growing up in East Los Angeles.

Quotation: “The trouble is you write about Chicanos. You should be writing about people.”

Talking Point: During the Q&A session, Viramontes said, “If we don’t embrace difference and open our minds, we will all be screwed”. Everyone got a kick out of it, but when you stop and think about it, she is absolutely correct. People that are closed-minded aren’t able to see the rest of the world. They only see what they want to, rather than accepting others and their cultures. By embracing someone else’s differences, we all gain a little more knowledge.

Connection: While reading the essay, she mentioned growing up in East Los Angeles. The situation is very similar to the school systems talked about in Savage Inequalities. There were very few library books, the school building was falling apart, and 99.9% of the school was attended by Mexican-Americans, showing the segregation in Los Angeles. She also mentioned there was a lot of gang violence on the streets of East Los Angeles.

QTPC 14-Savage Inequalities (83-132)

Quotation: page 98 “I have to ask myself why there should be an elementary school in District 10 with fifteen hundred children. Why should there be an elementary school within a skating rink? Why should the Board of Ed allow this? This is not the way things should be.”

Talking Point: I’m a believer in that the environment that these children grow up in is the number one reason why certain schools have been and will continue to be under-funded and have poor graduation rates. If the neighborhood a child grows up in is filled with crime and violence, then he will most likely engage in these activities outside of school because he can’t get away from it. Inside of the school, most teachers give the students little hope for success, which causes the students to want to attend school even less.

Connection: I’ve spent my entire life living in Highland, IN. It takes a five to ten minute drive to downtown Gary, IN. The schools depicted in this book are similar to some of the schools in Gary. Living so close to a town like this, you get to see firsthand how the events in this book are very real. The buildings are falling apart and there is little funding going into these schools. On a national scale, you hear about the violence that occurs in the city which further impedes the students’ learning.

QTPC 13-Savage Inequalities (1-82)

Quotation: page 18 “The ultimate terror for white people is to leave the highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis. People speak of getting lost in East St. Louis as a nightmare. The nightmare to me is that they never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the children here. They ought to get off that highway. The nightmare isn’t in their heads. It’s a real place. there are children living here.”

Talking Point: You never really notice how we take things for granted until we don’t have them. For example, on page 29, Mr. Solomon was saying how he has to buy his own AV equipment for his classes. In my high school, we used some form of AV everyday in almost every class. I wonder how different it would be had our school not provided AV equipment?

Connection: I made a connection between this book and the movie Freedom Writers, staring Hilary Swank and based off a true story.  Both show how the students know their future is grim given the conditions of the neighborhood and school. But even through this, the teacher provides hope for the students, even though other teachers at the school give the students no hope. She goes out of her way to buy books for her students, working two extra jobs to pay for those books. If only most teachers in communities like the ones shown in the book showed as much passion as Swank’s character did, maybe that could start a turnaround in these communities.

QTPC 12-Ways of Dying

Quotation: page 55 “And you know, what is worse is that I am of the same ethnic group as those hostel dwellers. The tribal chief who has formed them into armies that harass innocent residents merely uses ethnicity as an excuse for his own hunger for power. I am from the same clan as this blood-soaked tribal chief.”

Talking Point: Mda and Coetzee have to very different approaches on describing the racism that occurs in South Africa. While both acknowledge that racism is present, Mda comes right out and gives us clear cut examples, like the white colleague burning the black laborer, while Coetzee goes under the radar in his description.

Connection: I made a connection with Ways of Dying and the videos we watched in class Monday. In both cases, we see how racial tensions escalated into acts of violence. Whether it be lighting someone on fire, beating them, torturing them, or attacking them with dogs. Both showed that whites thought they were better than people of different skin color just for that reason: their skin color is different. For some reason they felt they had the right to do these terrible things to others of different skin color.

QTPC 11-Disgrace (147-220)

Quotation: page 210 “I don’t know. I don’t know what the question is any more. Between Lucy’s generation and mine a curtain seems to have fallen. I didn’t even notice when it fell.”

Talking Point: I really had thought that David would change his ways after what happened to his daughter. But after having sex with Bev and the prostitute, and the way he thought about Melanie’s younger sister, clearly the event had little impact on him and his quote on page 216 sums it up. “I suspect it is too late for me. I’m just an old lag serving out my sentence…”

Connection: When watching the videos in class and comparing them to the racial situation in the US, the one thing that stood out most was the attacks on the non-whites in Africa and the attacks that took place throughout the South in the US during the 1960s. In both cases we see police brutality, dogs attacking victims, and the use guns.  These events are very similar. One difference in the racial tensions between the US and South Africa is the length of time it took for the racial tensions to die down. While there are still some issues in both countries, South Africa’s issues are more intense  because they got rid of apartheid in 1994, where as the US’s racial segregation ended in the 1970s.

QTPC 10-Disgrace (80-146)

Quotation: page 133 “Lucy, Lucy, I plead with you! You want to make up for the wrongs of the past, but this is not the way to do it. If you fail to stand up for yourself at this moment, you will never be able to hold ypur head up again. You may as well pack your bags and leave. As for the police, if you are too delicate to call them in now, then we should never have involved them in the first place. We should just have kept quiet and waited for the next attack. or cut our own throats.”

Talking Point: I had a feeling from page 64 when we first met Petrus that he wasn’t exactly the person Lucy thinks he is. David was asking him about Lucy’s safety here in  this isolated portion of Africa, and Petrus replies, “Yes, it is dangerous.” He pauses. “Everything is dangerous today. But here it is all right, I think.” And he gives another smile. We learn in this section of the book that Petrus had some involvement in what happened to David and Lucy.

Connection: It is very hard to find a connection to this book. You hear stories on the news all the time about people being attacked and taken advantage of. So the only example that I could make was between this book and the movie Taken.  A father’s daughter goes to Europe and gets taken by a gang that deals largley in sex slaves. While Lucy was never taken by her attackers, she was still taken advantage of, and she had seen her attackers just moments before, just as in Taken.