The Road

The Road is a book written by Cormac McCarthy. The book has received the Pulitzer Prize and is soon to be a cinema movie, February the 19th to be correct. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting where the world has gone trough a crisis and is completely destroyed. We never get to know exactly what has happened. Only a tiny percentage of mankind have managed to survive. The book follows a father and a son on their journey throughout nothingness and ruins of the former American continent. As in the way they manage to survive, it seems to me like they have lived under these circumstances for many years. At the beginning of the book they are located in the northern part of the United States, and their goal is to get to the Southern part before the winter arrives. The country is completely lawless and they have to stay low due to other survivors, amongst them criminals and murderers. At first I thought that maybe the world had gone through a massive pandemic illness which caused all of the human population to turn mean on each other, but as I read further I understood that it is the disastrous conditions that have made the surviving human beings to kill each other. Imagine living under those circumstances. I believe most of us would have changed our behaviour dramatically. The basic instincts would have overshadowed everything else.

However, the boy and the father meet a fellow survivor in their path down south. The boy wants to help the man, but the father knows that they can't let a stranger's needs come in front of their own. The father's son whose name is unmentioned in the book seems to understand that they don't have much time left on the surface of the destroyed earth. He also says to his father that he wants to stay with his mom, which is dead. This basically means that he would rather die than living under such circumstances. There are flashbacks in the book which indicates that his mom gave birth to him and later took her own life.
In my opinion, I quite don't see how this book has received that vast amount of prizes and acclaims yet. I hope it reaches up to my expectations as the story goes further on.

A new method of working

Right now in class, all of the classmates are collaborating together as a group. Our teacher has splitted us up in groups of five and given us various tasks. One of the groups is the front desk. Their responsibility is to divide material, prioritize, approve material and give the other groups time limits. My group is called the research group. Our job is to find and gather relevant material and send it to the other groups. Then we have the journalists, whose jobs are to write blogs and send them to the teachers, designers and the front desk. The fourth group consists of the teachers. They make criteria rubrics in terms of the test we are having next week. They also write the test questions. At last we have the designers. They create so-called Glogs and Photostories with the gathered material.

I liked this varation of working. Some got more to do than others, but at the same time I believe that everybody learned something new today.

Nobama

Last week in class, we saw a documentary made by Alexandra Pelosi. The movie was filmed during the election race in America between Barack Obama and John McCain. Pelosi had chosen to focus on McCain's supporters and their view on Obama. I found it very interesting to see that many of them actually seemed more engaged in preventing Obama from becoming president than McCain to actually become the president. Some of the interviewees began crying when asked about how they thought America would develop if Obama was elected. Not tears of bliss, but bitter, scared thoughts.

Several interviewees drew a connection between Obama and Germany's imperial chancellor during WWII, Adolf Hitler. They compared Obama's and Hitler's charisma and their way of speaking to the crowd. I have to add that another argument for the comparison was the situation America was in during the election and the situation Germany was in during Hitler's party NSDAP's election.
But still, the comparison really blew my mind. How can one compare one of the most racist men in history and an African-American man, solely based on their speaking gifts? I tried to put myself in their situation. The American presidential line-up throughout the history has consisted mostly of middle-aged to old white men. As for the recent history, neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush jr. were impressive speakers. And so Obama enters the history, a colored man quite young for his coming goal. For the American conservatives this may have come as a shock.

Some of the Southerners also admit this in the documentary. One of the men interviewed actually states that "America is not ready for a colored man as president. I believe the society is moving too fast. If it were up to me, you shouldn't have the ability to vote." when talking to the female interviewer. First I found this statement very provoking, but after some thought I have to say that at least he has the guts to stand for his opinion. America is a country of liberty and he should be able to believe in whatever he wants to.

As you could see in the documentary, most of McCains "hard voters" lived in the inland of America. I allow myself to generalize a little bit: many of them were typical Christian rednecks. They were very religious and worked hard in the agriculture industry. They called themselves "real Americans" and pointed at the fact that they worked hard to keep the wheels of the country turning. Many of them did not believe Obama cared enough for them.

Now I have only mentioned a few of the comparisons and statements concerning Obama shown in the documentary. Other examples of comparisons were that Obama was the Antichrist and that he was the devil in human form. Some simply pointed at the fact that he is a "nigger" and therefore not able to fill the presidential role. In my opinion, many of these people seemed like they were living in the past. They were simply Christian, farm-working Americans that were not ready for such a dramatically change.

I strongly recommend the documentary. You can find it on Youtube. Here are the links:
Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
Enjoy!

Environmental abuse - an inconvenient truth

We are starting up with our senior projects this week, and now is the time to decide on which topic we are to write about. I have thought about both homosexual rights in the state of California and topics concerning the environmental abuse in America today. The reason I have thought about these two topics is because they both appeal to my interests. There is an ongoing debate in California right now concerning the right for homosexual couples to marry each other.

After much thought, I've decided to go for environmental abuse. I am going to do an in-depth study on Al Gore with the main focus on his movie The Inconvenient Truth, the Climate Project and his receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize. I want to find out in which ways he has affected American citizens and people all over the world.

Obama's new Health Reform

Hi to all my thousands of readers. I want to wish everyone a happy new year! This is my first blog post in 2010, concerning Obama's new Health Reform.

In America today, they have a health system different from the system we have in Norway. The American people have to buy health insurances which are supposed to cover their expenses in terms of hospital visits, medical treatments etc. in case of illnesses. The health insurances are too expensive for the poor part of the American population, which means that they cannot afford to get ill. For instance, if they fall and break their leg or suffer from a major infection, they do not have the money to pay for the medical treatment they need. One of Obama's matters close to his heart has been to reform this health system. He wants a system more similar to our Norwegian health system so that the poor population also can afford to get medical treatment when needed.

The new Health reform includes: You can choose to keep your insurance if you like the one you have from before, there will be no more denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, no dropped coverage when you get sick, it eliminates yearly and lifetime caps of coverage, it caps out-of-pocket expenses and it requires coverage for preventive care. For the citizens who do not have a health insurance there will be created a new insurance marketplace called the Exchange which includes new tax credits for individuals and small businesses and low-cost coverage for individual and small businesses. Obama says that the new Health Reform will not add money to deficit, but will be paid for by the savings within the existing health care system. The reform also includes independent medical experts to identify abuse, waste and fraud in the system. In my opinion, the Health Reform seems genuinely positive for the American population. Today, the system is obviously malfunctioning and Obama has done the only right thing to do; to reform the health-care. I truly hope that the protesters realizes this in the future.

The American Constitution

In class last week, we had an American visitor who taught us about the American Constitution. Her name is Lee-Ann Potter and she is from Maryland. Originally, she is the director of education and volunteer programs at the United States national archives in Washington, D.C. This year, she has moved to Norway with her family to serve as a Roving Scholar of American Studies.

Her way of teaching was inspiring and efficient. First, she introduced herself and the theme. Then she wanted us to talk with each other about why America has a constitution and what it contains. Later she showed us pictures concerning the Constitution. The photo I have included in my blog entry is actually the preamble of the American Consitituion made by license plates. It was a different and fun way to learn about politics.

The preamble goes like this:
We the People of the United States,
in order to form a more perfect union,
establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare,
and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our prosperity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Milk

Milk is a biographical movie about an American gay activist named Harvey Milk. He was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Milk is in a relationship with a man named Smith. They are tired of the discrimination of homosexual individuals in the United States and decide to to something about it. They move to San Fransisco, in hopes of finding larger acceptance of their relationship. Milk and Smith start a camera shop called Castro Camera, where they also arrange meetings with the gay people in their neighborhood. Milk decides to engage in the politics and starts a campaign to become a city supervisor. After two failed campaigns, Smith no longer endure Milk's devition to politics and breaks up with him. After the fourth year of campaigning, Milk wins a seat in the San Fransisco Board of Supervisors. This was a great step towards equality between the homosexual and heterosexual part of the American population.