authors note/ work cited page

The Armenian Genocide was the killing of about 1 ½ million Armenians boy the Ottoman Empire. From 1514 to 1918 the country Armenia was part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Russo-Turkish war in 1877, the Armenians were thinking of declaring independence. This, the already weakened Ottomans took as a threat. During WW1 the Ottomans thought that the Armenians were aiding Russia so they deported 1 ½ million Armenians to a desert in Syria where they all died of starvation or dehydration. Most people consider this to be genocide but the Turkish government still denies that this event ever took place (“Armenian Genocide”).

I stumbled across this topic while researching the song yes, its genocide by Serj Tankian. This song is written in another language so as I was trying to find out the meaning to the words, I found out what it was about, the Armenian Genocide. While I was researching more about this topic I really had a hard time finding good sources. This really bothered me; I feel like an event as terrible as genocide should be recognized by everybody, including the US (who doesn’t as of now) and the whole world. (“Armenian Genocide”).

I am not really trying to send a message like “always eat your vegetables” or “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” I just want people to know about this event and what it exactly was. I also want the US being one of the largest and most influential countries to recognize this event.

St

John, Ronald Bruce. "Armenian Genocide." World Book Student. World Book, 2010. Web. 13 Dec. 2010.

 
Cohan, Sara. "A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide." Social Education Vol. 69, No. 6. Oct. 2005: 333-337. SIRS Researcher. Web. 13 Dec 2010.

Research assignment #2

the second article i got was from world book again and it was about the holocaust. i choose the holocaust as my second topic because it is by far the most studied genocide and since i am doing the Armenian genocide i wanted to look at the biggest example. so, as established before, genocide is the systematic killing of a group of people based on religion, nationality, race, ect... the holocaust was the genocide committed by the dictator Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers society (Nazi) party. the Nazi party is most famous for killing 6 million Jews, but he also had killed anybody who opposed him or he thought inferior to himself, ie: gypsies, mentally retarded or disabled people, poles, soviets, communists,  gays and lesbians and also Jehovah's witnesses. one of the ways that Hitler and the Nazis would kill people was by sending them to the various concentration camps around Germany and Poland. these concentration camps were most famous for their gas chambers where people thought that they would be taking a shower but really they would be getting killed by poisonous gases. near the end of the war, the Americans and the Russians liberated all of these concentration camps. very few people survived these camps and even fewer weren't changed for life.

reaserch assignment #1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

i know, i know when you see this your gonna be like "why is he using Wikipedia?!" because it is a good starting point to learn a little bit about a topic i and many other people know about. so the Armenian genocide was, well a genocide. genocide is the systematic killing and destroying of a race, religion, ect... so that means that the holocaust was a genocide and a very terrible one at that, but it wasn't the first. the Armenian genocide was one of the first genocides. it started up in Armenia where the Ottoman empire started a genocide against the Armenians. it basically was the inspiration for the holocaust. 1.5 million people died and i bet you that half of Americans half no clue what it was. one of the most outraging events in this genocide is the deportations in Constantinople. what happened was that many leaders from Armenia were in Constantinople doing something when the ottomans came and arrested them and then later deported them. and it also had all of the best from the holocaust including burnings, gasing, death marches and last but not least concentration camps.

i also used the world book Armenian genocide but it gave me the same info so i just combined the stuff into one.

social awarness issues in my book

• anti semitism
• death
• hopelessness
• survival. 

i want to write about anti antisemitism because i am reading MAUS and that is the main topic in the book. MAUS, with the bulk of the book about a Jew who is in the holocaust you would assume that the book would be very antisemitic. before i read this book i had read many other books about the holocaust, Milkweed, Uncle Misha's Partisans and The Diary Of Anne Frank to name a few. MAUS really stuck out to me though because it was about the overall mix of the holocaust and the war and how they both sometimes collided. i also really likes MAUS because it was a graphic novel. most of the other books i have read have been about a specific thing, like being in hiding, being a partisan, or being in a ghetto. but what was great about MAUS is that it wasn't actually people, they were various animals i will give you a key

the Jews- mice
the polish- pigs
the Germans- cats
the Americans- dogs
the french- frogs
the russians- not said

i am really suprised that you can get such a convincing and point telling message through animals so that really impressed me

social awarness song gathering and one entry

bully- three days grace
borders are...- serj tankian
yes, it's genocide- serj tankian
left of center- serj tankian
peace be revenged- serj tankian

entry about peace be revenged

although this might not in some eyes be the biggest issue in the songs I've named others were the armeninan genocide, borders and war but this one stuck out to me the most because it directly had to deal with me.
this song is basically saying how humans are screwing up the world, an example of this from the song is.

"Once we used to hear the light footsteps of dear
now we have no fear and in turn will disappear
We have built our lives without nature in mind
So that we've become the disease but we wont go"
this song is not only one of my favorite songs but also, at least to me, it leaves a very, very strong message. i also agree with this, humans have become a disease but we aren't stopping we are just spreading. nature means next to nothing to more then half the people in the world and the people who do are out numbered and out gunnned

social awarness issues in my community

• bullying
• racism
• disrespect
• stabbings
• gangs
• violence

although there aren't many gangs in my neighborhood/ community, there are some and those some aren't really that bad but they still are there and they affect me daily. throughout most of 6th and 7th grade i was scared to walk up 4th st to get to my house so i walked up 3rd st and that worked out fine this year and the end of last year i started walking up 4th st. the other day me and a couple of friends were walking up 4th st and we saw these kids from John Jay high school came down the block and they were smoking pot. my friends and i had no idea what to do because a high person is a dangerous person. so we just started randomly talking about how in the world does a spider spin green silk. this worked and looking back on that experience it was really funny but trust me at the time we all, or at least i know i was flipping out inside. and an earlier experience i had gone through was when i was going to shule(shule is school in yiddish and it is basically hebrew school except you learn yiddish and more about culture.) when these highschool kids popped out from around the corner and started walking after me. the exact details aren't really clear to me but i do know that they tried to mug me, then they left, they came back and tried to mug me again. ever since then i honestly will not go up that street.

social awarness song

(taken from Mrs Robinson)

hola todos of you immigrants
stand up and fight for all your rights
its aiiiiight

nosotros sing para tu derechos
we are all equal humanos
en este muuuuundoooooo

extra credit entry, The Giver

In the book The Giver, there is a world full of completely oblivious people. They have no connection to the outside world; hell they think that their little town is the only world. I feel that their form of government is wrong for shielding the peoples eyes like that I don’t think that it is helping anybody, it is actually killing people because in their attempts to keep people ignorant they have to kill people to do so. An example of this is when the old receiver filed for release because she couldn’t deal with the reality. By shielding their community from the harsh reality the elders made a problem of when this reality gets through not only do the people not know what to do they don’t really know what to do.

I also think that in Jonas’s case people are being fed lies on a silver platter and when one person refuses to take that food and eat it, they die. An example of this is when the plane crashed into the city. They didn’t know what to do so they killed the plane driver. They die because the government wouldn’t know how to deal if people stopped believing what they were told and if they wanted to not be in this community anymore and go out and basically have free will.

In our case though I think it is different because our government doesn’t forcibly block our thoughts and… wait never mind they do or at least on some occasions but that’s not what I meant. They don’t forcibly make it so that we are ignorant we choose to do that ourselves and I don’t really understand why. I think that it may be because since it doesn’t directly affect us we don’t really seem to give a damn.

I think that we as Americans are sort of disconnected from the world I mean really think about it. (Everywhere else uses centimeters but we use inches.) So many people are ignorant about the world outside in other countries; the only reason people know what happened in Haiti is because of the people on the news.

social awarness october 28

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/opinion/28kristof.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB 

i was reading the new york times trying to find something to do and a certain article really caught my eyes. "end the war on pot," was the name of the article. this was really interesting, it was about one journalists who went into how pot should be legalized, i might disagree with him but, he brought up a very good point, he said that the USA spends more money on jail and juvenile for drugs then on many public schools. "A Harvard economist, Jeffrey A. Miron, calculates that marijuana could generate $8.7 billion in tax revenue each year if legalized nationally, while legalization would also save the same sum annually in enforcement costs." that's a lot of dough so basically it makes the USA 17 billion dollars every year. but it also raises the point, well the same is with smoking, although it isn't illegal to buy and smoke it could soon be and is this fair, legalize one thing and illegalize another? i don't think so.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/world/middleeast/28iran.html?ref=world

this article also caught my eye, it was about the USA and other European countrys are trying to limit the amount of nuclear bombs Iran has. they are proposing to make Iran ship 2/3 more then they already are in uranium. also they would have to bring its nuclear fuel levels down to 20 percent of now which would really lower their ability to make nuclear bombs. this really made me think, if we are enforcing and cracking down on theses middle eastern countrys, why do we still have nuclear bombs. i bet that half of these people we are attacking because they have nuclear bombs would get rid of theirs if we got rid of ours. just a thought though 

entry #8

At first, this poem doesn't seem to be that deep. My first read through i didn't get a feel for the poem at all, i think this was because i wasn't looking at the poem in the right way. the second time through was a little better, i got the crystal stair-life thing and i enjoyed it much more. the third time through i picked up even more, i picked up the hard things in her life and her reaching platforms is like goals and progress and i thought that turning corner was discovering new things, maybe being a little scared. so all in all my understanding of the poem got better the more times i read it, i also liked it a lot more the last time i read it as opposed to the first time i read it.

Appreciation First Draft

You know that you have a book when the two main characters are a short genius and a big idiot who bond and become the best of friends and start "riding high above the world and slaying dragons."

There can only be one book I'm talking about, Freak The Mighty and that is one of the many things that make me read this book over and over again, the uniqueness. This book is one of the most unique books in the world because it's different from any other book I have read and this is why I keep reading it time and time again. For me, it takes a lot to get me reading realistic fiction, I mean A LOT, but this book, whatever the reason, has drawn me in and won't let go and I am glad for that.

I can make a connection here despite this books uniqueness. I feel like Max and Freak can be compared to any other character's that are different, for example Wilbur in E.B. White's Charlotte’s Web because they both have something different about them that people don't like or that make them out of the group until a friend comes along who will accept them for who they are.

Another thing I appreciate although others may disagree was the movie. Although people will argue that hey they wrote a whole damn new beginning, well that is what I liked most about the movie and the book for that matter, how they met. In the book it is when Freak loses an Ornithopter in a tree, in the movie Blade rolls a basketball at Freak, which knocks him down, and Max gets blamed for it. The reason why I love the fact that there are two different beginnings and their relationships start differently but they still end the same, with me in tears.  Personally I loved the actors; they kept it action packed and humorous while still keeping that great essence of the book. Kieran Culkin played freak, and was very good. Although he wasn’t the textbook Freak I still love the job that he did. Eldon Henson played Max I loved this. I don’t think they could have picked someone better to play Max, he really made himself seem like a big bumbling idiot.

And last but certainly not least, actually probably greatest thing I appreciate is how this short little genius and this big idiot, bond and become great friends. Personally I love this idea that 2 people so different can bond and turn into great friends, personally I don’t think in real life it is like this, or at least not in middle school. In middle school everyone stays to their own little group of friends. This also goes back to my first idea but I won't get into that. I love how they become friends, by the same common goal and interest, adventure, even though Max doesn't know that's what he loves yet. Regardless of how they became friends I love it how they ARE friends because it really shows that anybody can be anybody's friend if they try hard enough. The only thing I question is the truth to this, can anybody actually be friends despite their differences, I think that the answer is yes and I also think that people should give anybody and everybody a shot, I try to do that to the best of my abilities and I think everyone else should to.

Entry #7 Movie: The Mighty

well despite things i have heard about this movie i had a great experience watching this movie. i had heard from certain people (cough, cough, Tomin) that the only part of the movie that was good was the last 15 minuets of the movie. although the last 15 minuets were so good and sad enough to make me start balling, i thought the movie as a whole deserved a thumbs up. i really enjoyed watching this because it really helped me to think more about the book and also i basically got a whole new beginning of a story. i think that watching the movie defiantly did it's job by helping to expand my thinking and questions about the book. even though it was very good and even though Kieran Culkin was really good as freak it really is hard to get over the fact that the beginning was completely different. Kieran Culkin did a good job at what it seemed he was trying to accomplish as Freak but just Freak's whole character and attitude was much different from how i imagined Freak would be. all in all though i really enjoyed the movie and now i sort of want to read the second book.

Entry #6 Freak The Mighty

i really like how freak and max are very different but they also need each other. this really shows me that opposites can attract. i feel like usually this is either completely true or completely the opposite.

 i really like how freak and max bonded. for me most of my friends are just like me or just barely different from me.

i honestly do wonder how they get along. i mean freak is this really brainy small kid whereas max is this giant person who is dumb as a rock. then again i can understand it because freak, being very small, needs a big strong muscular body. max on the other hand needs a brain to go along with his body. they are just like yin and yang.

entry #4

i read Tomin's article and even though i never read the book, i could see where he was coming from. the issue of redemption comes up in almost every book. i remember when  Tomin, Merek and me were into chess and you would always win, but enough of that back to Tomins article. Tomin really touched on an important topic of redemption. it is a very key issue both in books and in life. some people and book characters spend their entire lives trying to get redemption for something but is it really worth it in the end. i personally don't think so because lets say you actually get redemption, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? and if you can't get redemption well then that was a bad waste of your life. then again i have never been in the position where i have wanted to take redemption and i imagine that it must be very different for someone in that position. what i think Tomin is taking about is how you can usually get redemption. no offense to Tomin but i didn't get the whole chess analogy because i felt like they were two separate ideas the chess and the story so that is really my only issue with Tomins response.