Children Being Tried as Adults Essay Example for Free

Children Being Tried as Adults Essay Some juveniles think that because they are minors, they can’t be severely punished just like adults. Using this thinking, many minors commit crimes thinking of little to no consequences at all. With this thinking, the â€Å"double standard† comes into place. Female juveniles think because of their gender, they can really get away with crimes. For the average american, the term juvenile delinquent is likely to conjure up the image of a teen-age male. The one-sided image is fed by media stories that all but ignore the existence of young offenders who are female. Most of the professional literature on juvenile delinquency is similarly slanted. Should minors who commit crimes be prosecuted as adults? That is indeed a topic you have to really think about twice. All crimes committed by juveniles should and must be treated in the same regard as adults. These kids go to juvenile court and get shortened sentences because of their age, thats not right. They commit big boy crimes, they have to do big boy time. When you think of the word â€Å"Juvenile† what’s the first thing you think about? The first thing that comes to my mind is crime simply because when i hear the word juvenile, its usually followed by delinquent. Until the early 19th century in the United States, children as young as 7 years old could be tried in criminal court and, if found guilty, sentenced to prison or even to death. Children under the age of 7 were thought to be unable to commit criminal acts and were therefore exempt from punishment. Reformers believed that treating children and adolescents as adult criminals was unnecessarily harsh and resulted in their corruption. A 1991 study by Virginias Department of Youth and Family Services, entitled Young Women in the Juvenile System, concluded that girls serve more time in training schools than their male counterparts, and for less serious offenses. The same pattern prevails in most other jurisdictions. (Anderson) Between 1994 and 2010, violent crime arrest rates decreased for all age groups, but more for juveniles than for adults. More specifically, the rates dropped an average of 54 percent for teenagers 15 to 17, compared to 38 percent for those between 18 and 39. And while arrest rates for violent crimes were higher in 2010 than in 1980 for all ages over 24, the rates for juveniles ages 15 to 17 were down from 1980. (Brown) Not everyone agrees that tougher crime laws for juveniles are fair or will cut down on youth crime. Many opponents of penalizing kids as adults believe that young criminals, unlike adult offenders, are still developing personal values and character. Juveniles, they say, can be more easily reformed, or rehabilitated, to turn their lives around and lead productive lives. For example, in a documentary i recently watched, all of the adults had been to jail and had a bad childhood but had changed their lives for the best. Many people have shown their disagreement with the statement above in many ways creating controversy. â€Å"Lock ‘Em Up† says one civilian/pedestrian in a street interview . â€Å"Let ‘Em off, they’re just babies† says another civilian. These two statements/opinions stirred up lots of controversy and debates on live television. In one argument a tv reporter said that It doesnt mean adolescents cant make rational decisions or appreciate the difference between right and wrong. But it does mean that, particularly when confronted with stressful or emotional circumstances, they are more likely to act impulsively, on instinct, without fully understanding or considering the consequences of their actions. Some controversy comes in with the parents thinking that their children don’t deserve to be tried as adults in their situation. For example, Paul Henry Gingerich, a 14 year old murder suspect is believed to be the youngest person in Indiana ever sentenced to prison as an adult. He was still 12 years old when he arrived here at the Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility, the states maximum security prison for children. His mother could not do much due to the severity of the situation. Over 200,000 children are charged as adults every year says a researcher at Temple University. At the age of 16, Cameron Williams lives a life far removed from the world of other teenagers. Williams, who celebrated his sixteenth birthday in jail, faces up to 110 years behind bars for second-degree attempted murder and use of a weapon to commit a felony. In November, Williams shot at a police officer in Omaha, Nebraska as he was being chased after being pulled over in a car with two other men. Hes also charged with robbery and assault in another county. Even though he is a minor. Many people are affected/involved in these juvenile cases. In many cases, the juveniles themselves are the ones who are greatly affected because they are the ones who have messed up their future. The parents are also majorly affected by children being charged as adults because they still look at their children as innocent and as babies. In a recent california case, a 15 year old boy was sentenced to 20 years on a murder charged in a maximum security facility and was beaten to death. This made the state and even parts of the nation rethink this whole â€Å"age doesn’t matter thing† when it comes to juvenile sentencing. To decrease juvenile crimes there are several prevention programs. There is a program called D.A.R.E which stands for Drug, Abuse, Resistance, Education. The program is for kids as old as 18 and as young as 11. There are also programs like after school matters which teaches children the importance of staying in school and staying on the right path, and finally P A.C.E. is Programming for Young Women in the Juvenile Justice System, which also helps to rehabilitate juveniles after they are released from jail. (Anderson, George M.) Another possible solution could be for parents to teach their children right from wrong early in their lives and for older children, spend more time with them and show them that you care about them/love them, and most of all be there for them throughout their lives. Statistics show that children who grow up in a single-parent household are nine times more likely to go to prison, eight times more likely to commit violent crimes, and ten times more likely to get hooked on drugs than in a two-parent home. After some long research I concluded that teens today dont fear the law because they dont think they will get caught. And if they do, they know they have a good chance of getting off because they are tried as teens and not adults. We have to get tougher on crime. There should be a law that everyone over eleven years old will be tried as adults. That way more teens would be discouraged from committing crimes. They would know that murder would get them a very long sentence instead of sta ying in juvenile hall until they are eighteen. If we want to cut down on teen crime, we have to have tougher laws.

Why Literature Essay Example for Free

Why Literature Essay It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my mother, he explains. She is a great reader and loves literature. Immediately I ask: And what about you? Dont you like to read? The answer is almost always the same: Of course I like to read, but I am a very busy person. I have heard this explanation dozens of times: this man and many thousands of men like him have so many important things to do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste their precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or a literary essay for hours and hours. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt lofty and useful for cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essentially an entertainment, an adornment that only people with time for recreation can afford. It is something to fit in between sports, the movies, a game of bridge or chess; and it can be sacrificed without scruple when one prioritizes the tasks and the duties that are indispensable in the struggle of life. It seems clear that literature has become more and more a female activity. In bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers, and even in university departments dedicated to the humanities, the women clearly outnumber the men. The explanation traditionally given is that middle-class women read more because they work fewer hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can justify more easily than men the time that they devote to fantasy and illusion. I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings; but there is no doubt that there are fewer and fewer readers of literature, and that among the saving remnant of readers women predominate. This is the case almost everywhere. In Spain, for example, a recent survey organized by the General Society of Spanish Writers revealed that half of that countrys population has never read a book. The survey also revealed that in the minority that does read, the number of women who admitted to reading surpasses the number of men by 6. 2 percent, a difference that appears to be increasing. I am happy for these women, but I feel sorry for these men, and for the millions of human beings who could read but have decided not to read. They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure that they are missing, but also because I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in which literature has been relegatedlike some hidden viceto the margins of social and personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free individuals. |[pic] | e live in the era of the specialization of knowledge, thanks to the prodigious development of science and technology and to the consequent fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable parcels and compartments. This cultural trend is, if anything, likely to be accentuated in years to come. To be sure, specialization brings many benefits. It allows for deeper exploration and greater experimentation; it is the very engine of progress. Yet it also has negative consequences, for it eliminates those common intellectual and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to communicate, to feel a sense of solidarity. Specialization leads to a lack of social understanding, to the division of human beings into ghettos of technicians and specialists. The specialization of knowledge requires specialized languages and increasingly arcane codes, as information becomes more and more specific and compartmentalized. This is the particularism and the division against which an old proverb warned us: do not focus too much on the branch or the leaf, lest you forget that they are part of a tree, or too much on the tree, lest you forget that it is part of a forest. Awareness of the existence of the forest creates the feeling of generality, the feeling of belonging, that binds society together and prevents it from disintegrating into a myriad of solipsistic particularities. The solipsism of nations and individuals produces paranoia and delirium, distortions of reality that generate hatred, wars, and even genocide. In our time, science and technology cannot play an integrating role, precisely because of the infinite richness of knowledge and the speed of its evolution, which have led to specialization and its obscurities. But literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances. It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of their lives, to transcend history: as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy, we understand each other across space and time, and we feel ourselves to be members of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as human beings, what remains common in all of us under the broad range of differences that separate us. Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and that only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation. Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of humanitys multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. |[pic| |] | his complex sum of contradictory truthsas Isaiah Berlin called themconstitutes the very substance of the human condition. In todays world, this totalizing and living knowledge of a human being may be found only in literature. Not even the other branches of the humanitiesnot philosophy, history, or the arts, and certainly not the social scienceshave been able to preserve this integrating vision, this universalizing discourse. The humanities, too, have succumbed to the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, isolating themselves in increasingly segmented and technical sectors whose ideas and vocabularies lie beyond the reach of the common woman and man. Some critics and theorists would even like to change literature into a science. But this will never happen, because fiction does not exist to investigate only a single precinct of experience. It exists to enrich through the imagination the entirety of human life, which cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series of schemas or formulas without disappearing. This is the meaning of Prousts observation that real life, at last enlightened and revealed, the only life fully lived, is literature. He was not exaggerating, nor was he expressing only his love for his own vocation. He was advancing the particular proposition that as a result of literature life is better understood and better lived; and that living life more fully necessitates living it and sharing it with others. The brotherly link that literature establishes among human beings, compelling them to enter into dialogue and making them conscious of a common origin and a common goal, transcends all temporal barriers. Literature transports us into the past and links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those texts that have come down to us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream. This feeling of membership in the collective human experience across time and space is the highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every generation than literature. |[| |p| |i| |c| |]| t always irritated Borges when he was asked, What is the use of literature? It seemed to him a stupid question, to which he would reply: No one would ask what is the use of a canarys song or a beautiful sunset. If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks to them, life is even for an instant less ugly and less sad, is it not petty to seek practical justifications? But the question is a good one. For novels and poems are not like the sound of birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking into the horizon, because they were not created by chance or by nature. They are human creations, and it is therefore legitimate to ask how and why they came into the world, and what is their purpose, and why they have lasted so long. Literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a writers consciousness, projected into it by the combined strength of the unconscious, and the writers sensitivity to the world around him, and the writers emotions; and it is these things to which the poet or the narrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body, movement, rhythm, harmony, and life. An artificial life, to be sure, a life imagined, a life made of languageyet men and women seek out this artificial life, some frequently, others sporadically, because real life falls short for them, and is incapable of offering them what they want. Literature does not begin to exist through the work of a single individual. It exists only when it is adopted by others and becomes a part of social lifewhen it becomes, thanks to reading, a shared experience. One of its first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language. A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less richness of nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. A humanity without reading. untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf-mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous problems of communication due to its crude and rudimentary language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and in imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words. We learn how to speak correctlyand deeply, rigorously, and subtlyfrom good literature, and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can substitute for literature in crafting the language that people need to communicate. To speak well, to have at ones disposal a rich and diverse language, to be able to find the appropriate expression for every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be better prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to fantasize, to dream, to feel. In a surreptitious way, words reverberate in all our actions, even in those actions that seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, and reached high levels of refinement and manners, it increased the possibility of human enjoyment. Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by televisions soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts. Nor are the audiovisual media equipped to replace literature in this task of teaching human beings to use with assurance and with skill the extraordinarily rich possibilities that language encompasses. On the contrary, the audiovisual media tend to relegate words to a secondary level with respect to images, which are the primordial language of these media, and to constrain language to its oral expression, to its indispensable minimum, far from its written dimension. To define a film or a television program as literary is an elegant way of saying that it is boring. For this reason, literary programs on the radio or on television rarely capture the public. So far as I know, the only exception to this rule was Bernard Pivots program, Apostrophes, in France. And this leads me to think that not only is literature indispensable for a full knowledge and a full mastery of language, but its fate is linked also and indissolubly with the fate of the book, that industrial product that many are now declaring obsolete. |[pic| |] | his brings me to Bill Gates. He was in Madrid not long ago and visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked upon a joint venture with Microsoft. Among other things, Gates assured the members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee that the letter - would never be removed  from computer softwarea promise that allowed four hundred million Spanish speakers on five continents to breathe a sigh of relief, since the banishment of such an essential letter from cyberspace would have created monumental problems. Immediately after making his amiable concession to the Spanish language, however, Gates, before even leaving the premises of the Academy, avowed in a press conference that he expected to accomplish his highest goal before he died. That goal, he explained, is to put an end to paper and then to books. In his judgment, books are anachronistic objects. Gates argued that computer screens are able to replace paper in all the functions that paper has heretofore assumed. He also insisted that, in addition to being less onerous, computers take up less space, and are more easily transportable; and also that the transmission of news and literature by these electronic media, instead of by newspapers and books, will have the ecological advantage of stopping the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that is a consequence of the paper industry. People will continue to read, Gates assured his listeners, but they will read on computer screens, and consequently there will be more chlorophyll in the environment. I was not present at Gatess little discourse; I learned these details from the press. Had I been there I would have booed Gates for proclaiming shamelessly his intention to send me and my colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And I would have vigorously disputed his analysis. Can the screen really replace the book in all its aspects? I am not so certain. I am fully aware of the enormous revolution that new technologies such as the Internet have caused in the fields of communication and the sharing of information, and I confess that the Internet provides invaluable help to me every day in my work; but my gratitude for these extraordinary conveniences does not imply a belief that the electronic screen can replace paper, or that reading on a computer can stand in for literary reading. That is a chasm that I cannot cross. I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book. Perhaps this a prejudice resulting from lack of practice, and from a long association of  literature with books and paper. But even though I enjoy surfing the Web in search of world news, I would never go to the screen to read a poem by Gongora or a novel by Onetti or an essay by Paz, because I am certain that the effect of such a reading would not be the same. I am convinced, although I cannot prove it, that with the disappearance of the book, literature would suffer a serious blow, even a mortal one. The term literature would not disappear, of course. Yet it would almost certainly be used to denote a type of text as distant from what we understand as literature today as soap operas are from the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare. |[pic| |] | here is still another reason to grant literature an important place in the life of nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss. This is because all good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors intending it, a seditious inclination is present. Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of non-conformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be incomplete. To ride alongside the scrawny Rocinante and the confused Knight on the fields of La Mancha, to sail the seas on the back of a whale with Captain Ahab, to drink arsenic with Emma Bovary, to become an insect with Gregor Samsa: these are all ways that we have invented to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be the same person when we wish to be many different people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us. Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarilybut in this miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal. We become more intense, richer, more complicated, happier, and more lucid than we are in the constrained routine of ordinary life. When we close the book and abandon literary fiction, we return to actual existence and compare it to the splendid land that we have just left. What a disappointment awaits us! Yet a tremendous realization also awaits us, namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is bettermore beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfectthan the life that we live while awake, a life conditioned by the limits and the tedium of our condition. In this way, good literature, genuine literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious: a challenge to what exists. How could we not feel cheated after reading War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past and returning to our world of insignificant details, of boundaries and prohibitions that lie in wait everywhere and, with each step, corrupt our illusions? Even more than the need to sustain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the greatest contribution of literature to human progress is perhaps to remind us (without intending to, in the majority of cases) that the world is badly made; and that those who pretend to the contrary, the powerful and the lucky, are lying; and that the world can be improved, and made more like the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create. A free and democratic society must have responsible and critical citizens conscious of the need continuously to examine the world that we inhabit and to try, even though it is more and more an impossible task, to make it more closely resemble the world that we would like to inhabit. And there is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination. Still, to call literature seditious because it sensitizes a readers consciousness to the imperfections of the world does not meanas churches and governments seem to think it means when they establish censorshipthat literary texts will provoke immediate social upheavals or accelerate revolutions. The social and political effects of a poem, a play, or a novel cannot be foreseen, because they are not collectively made or collectively experienced. They are created by individuals and they are read by individuals, who vary enormously in the conclusions that they draw from their writing and their reading. For this reason, it is difficult, or even impossible, to establish precise patterns. Moreover, the social consequences of a work of literature may have little to do with its aesthetic quality. A mediocre novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe seems to have played a decisive role in raising social and political consciousness of the horrors of slavery in the United States. The fact that these effects of literature are difficult to identify does not imply that they do not exist. The important point is that they are effects brought about by the actions of citizens whose personalities have been formed in part by books. Good literature, while temporarily relieving human dissatisfaction, actually increases it, by developing a critical and non-conformist attitude toward life. It might even be said that literature makes human beings more likely to be unhappy. To live dissatisfied, and at war with existence, is to seek things that may not be there, to condemn oneself to fight futile battles, like the battles that Colonel Aureliano Buenda fought in One Hundred Years of Solitude, knowing full well that he would lose them all. All this may be true. Yet it is also true that without rebellion against the mediocrity and the squalor of life, we would still live in a primitive state, and history would have stopped. The autonomous individual would not have been created, science and technology would not have progressed, human rights would not have been recognized, freedom would not have existed. All these things are born of unhappiness, of acts of defiance against a life perceived as insufficient or intolerable. For this spirit that scorns life as it isand searches with the madness of Don Quixote, whose insanity derived from the reading of chivalric novelsliterature has served as a great spur. |[pi| |c] | et us attempt a fantastic historical reconstruction. Let us imagine a world without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or novels. In this kind of atrophied civilization, with its puny lexicon in which groans and ape-like gesticulations would prevail over words, certain adjectives would not exist. Those adjectives include: quixotic, Kafkaesque, Rabelaisian, Orwellian, sadistic, and masochistic, all terms of literary origin. To be sure, we would still have insane people, and victims of paranoia and persecution complexes, and people with uncommon appetites and outrageous excesses, and bipeds who enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. But we would not have learned to see, behind these extremes of behavior that are prohibited by the norms of our culture, essential characteristics of the human condition. We would not have discovered our own traits, as only the talents of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, Orwell, de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have revealed them to us. When the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared, its first readers made fun of this extravagant dreamer, as well as the rest of the characters in the novel. Today we know that the insistence of the caballero de la triste figura on seeing giants where there were windmills, and on acting in his seemingly absurd way, is really the highest form of generosity, and a means of protest against the misery of this world in the hope of changing it. Our very notions of the ideal, and of idealism, so redolent with a positive moral connotation, would not be what they are, would not be clear and respected values, had they not been incarnated in the protagonist of a novel through the persuasive force of Cervantess genius. The same can be said of that small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary, who fought with ardor to live the splendid life of passion and luxury that she came to know through novels. Like a butterfly, she came too close to the flame and was burned in the fire. |[pic| |] | he inventions of all great literary creators open our eyes to unknown aspects of our own condition. They enable us to explore and to understand more fully the common human abyss. When we say Borgesian, the word immediately conjures up the separation of our minds from the rational order of reality and the entry into a fantastic universe, a rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine and arcane, and riddled with literary references and allusions, whose singularities are not foreign to us because in them we recognize hidden desires and intimate truths of our own personality that took shape only thanks to the literary creation of Jorge Luis Borges. The word Kafkaesque comes to mind, like the focus mechanism of those old cameras with their accordion arms, every time we feel threatened, as defenseless individuals, by the oppressive machines of power that have caused so much pain and injustice in the modern worldthe authoritarian regimes, the vertical parties, the intolerant churches, the asphyxiating bureaucrats. Without the short stories and the novels of that tormented Jew from Prague who wrote in German and lived always on the lookout, we would not have been able to understand the impotent feeling of the isolated individual, or the terror of persecuted and discriminated minorities, confronted with the all-embracing powers that can smash them and eliminate them without the henchmen even showing their faces. The adjective Orwellian, first cousin of Kafkaesque, gives a voice to the terrible anguish, the sensation of extreme absurdity, that was generated by totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, the most sophisticated, cruel, and absolute dictatorships in history, in their control of the actions and the psyches of the members of a society. In 1984, George Orwell described in cold and haunting shades a humanity subjugated to Big Brother, an absolute lord who, through an efficient combination of terror and technology, eliminated liberty, spontaneity, and equality, and transformed society into a beehive of automatons. In this nightmarish world, language also obeys power, and has been transformed into newspeak, purified of all invention and all subjectivity, metamorphosed into a string of platitudes that ensure the individuals slavery to the system. It is true that the sinister prophecy of 1984 did not come to pass, and totalitarian communism in the Soviet Union went the way of totalitarian fascism in Germany and elsewhere; and soon thereafter it began to deteriorate also in China, and in anachronistic Cuba and North Korea. But the danger is never completely dispelled, and the word Orwellian continues to describe the danger, and to help us to understand it. |[pic| |] | o literatures unrealities, literatures lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity. These monsters eager for transgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being; and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive potential that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery. A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible depths, which we urgently need to see. Uncivilized, barbarian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech, ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely animalistic world. Basic instincts would determine the daily practices of a life characterized by the struggle for survival, and the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities. There would be no place for the spirit. In this world, moreover, the crushing monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can change it. When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which booksthat is, works of literaturehave become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soullessa resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom. It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever come about. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends entirely on our vision and our will. But if we wish to avoid the impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom, then we must act. More precisely, we must read. MARIO VARGAS LLOSAs new book, The Feast of the Goat, will be published by Farrar, Straus Giroux in November. He is professor of Ibero-American Literature and Culture at Georgetown University.

Marketing Plan For Hospitality And Tourism Industry

Marketing Plan For Hospitality And Tourism Industry Explaining the importance of market research and advantages and disadvantages of implementation of the marketing plan for Hospitality/Tourism industry are the key concepts of this essay. To attain these objectives at first a brief description of market research and marketing plan have been given respectively followed by the importance of their presence in the service industry. Philip Kotler has defined market research as the systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data and findings relevant to a specific situation facing the company. (2009:190) Market research links the consumer, customer and public to the marketer through information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems. (Albert Breneman Blankenship et al, State of the art marketing research, 1998, pg 7) Market research is a vital part of any successful business today. Some of the benefits of market research for the operation of Hospitality industry are: Market research helps the industry to identify opportunities in the marketplace. For example, if you are planning to open a hotel/restaurant in a particular geographic location and have discovered that no such organisation currently exists, you have identified an opportunity. Thus the opportunity for success increases if the location is in a highly populated area with residents who match the target market characteristics which also can be done by research. Market research minimizes the risk of doing business. For example, marketing information may indicate that a marketplace is saturated with the type of service you plan to offer. This may cause you to alter your product offering or choose another location. Market research uncovers and identifies potential problems. Suppose your new hospitality organisation is thriving at its location on the main road through town. Through research you learn that in two years, the city is planning a by-pass, or alternate route, to ease traffic congestion through town. Youve identified a potential problem. Market research creates benchmarks and helps you track your progress. Its important to know, for later comparisons, the position of your business at particular moments in time. Ongoing market research allows the industry to make comparisons against benchmark measurements as well as chart of progress between research intervals (such as successive annual surveys). Success depends on a lot of things, but when you have information about a particular market segment, a geographic area, or customer preferences, youll be better prepared to make the decisions that can make or break your business. Many companies use market research as a guide. Whether you want to expand your business into a new area or introduce a new product, market research plays a great role in hospitality industry by providing valuable insight to prevent costly missteps. A marketing plan begins with the identification (through market research) of specific customer needs and how the firm intends to fulfil them while generating an acceptable level of return. It is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve one or more marketing objectives. It can be for a product or service, a brand, or a product line. Marketing plans cover between one and five years. It generally includes analysis of the current market situation (opportunities and trends) and detailed action programs, budgets, sales forecasts, strategies, and projected financial statements Advantages of implementation of the marketing plan for the service industry: It is imperative for the organization to regularly assess its competitive strength amidst its competitors in the market. This helps the organization in developing and modifying its marketing and sales planning. A well-written, comprehensive marketing plan is the focal point of all business ventures because it describes how you plan to attract and retain customers, the most crucial aspect of a business. It is the heart of the business, the basis from which all other operational and management plans are derived. Marketing offers you a wealth of information that if applied correctly virtually can ensure your success. Determines demand for product Aids in design of products that fulfil consumers needs Outlines measures for generating the cash for daily operation, to repay debts and to turn a profit Allows for test to see if strategies are giving the desired results Disadvantages of implementation of the marketing plan for the service industry: Identifies weaknesses in the business skills Leads to faulty marketing decisions based on improperly analyzed data Creates unrealistic financial projections if information is interpreted incorrectly Identifies weaknesses in the overall business plan (Mary Bellis. Marketing Plan for the Independent Inventor) The implementation of Marketing Planning simply tries to structure and shape the proposed marketing programmes and activities of the organisation. It offers numerous advantages; along with some drawbacks. However, the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. Part B Introduction This report is about a luxurious hotel from UK, which provides Spa utilities. Things like promotional products, who are the targets market, price, are going to be explained in detail. Spa Hotel The word spa, taken from the name of the famous mineral springs in Spa, Belgium, has become a common noun denoting any place with a medicinal or mineral spring. Less well known is its Eastern New England sense, soda fountain, probably an allusion to the carbonated or mineral water that is a staple ingredient of many soda fountain concoctions. The term Spa is associated with water treatment which is also known as ballneotherapy. Spa towns or spa resorts (including hot springs resorts) typically offer thermal or mineral water for drinking and bathing. They also offer various health treatments. The belief in the curative powers of mineral waters goes back to prehistoric times. Such practices have been popular worldwide, but are especially widespread in Europe and Japan. Day spas are also quite popular, and offer various personal care treatments. Chosen organisation: Alexander House and Utopia Spa Hotel It is located in EAST STREET, Turners Hill, West Sussex. It is an exclusive country house set in 175 acres of mature gardens and parkland yet only 15 minutes from Gatwick Airport and major motorways. The hotel has a vast range of amenities to include Utopia Spa: Target customers, Promotional activities and the Prising of the chosen product: The Hotel Spa doesnt have a specific target market but they put an accent on the adults which are keener to spend some relaxing days at a spa centre and old people too, who are coming for healthy treatments. Like any other business, the strategy to attract more customers includes promotional offers: Sunday Night Spa escape -enjoy, invigorate with an energetic massage concentrating on the back, neck and shoulders. Time= 25 minutes Bust your confidence with a special facial treatment with natural and fresh ingredients. Time = 25 minutes 50% off if you will take dinner in the hotels restaurant Everything for the price of  £140.00 Spring Special Spa Break  £159  £50 toward treatments of your choice Dinner allocation of  £30 on food only Overnight accommodation Analysis of the consumer survey questionnaire to find out the present market position of Spa Hotel: The table and pie charts given below give a breakdown of a market research on spa hotel in UK. As can be seen, people generally expect convenient, affordable and optimum services from the mentioned hotel. Research has been done by using questionnaire method, completed by 10 people from all walks of life. When we found an answer to the investigation question arisen in this report, firstly we will display the data in a table and pie chart respectively and, then, the descriptive statistics that allow us to reinforce those results and better understand those differences. In the second question, Spa experience has divided in 3 major catagories namely calm and quite place, busy night life and country side. Majority of people (6) wanted a calm and quiet place for their spa experience. A substantial number of people (3) have chosen busy night life while only one person has supported country side. In this context, we see that, in terms of the pieces of per night of a spa Hotel, the responders(6) prefer mainly option one which is  £125- £190 the lowest instead of the others, the second lowest price; in second place as 3 people chose it. Lastly nobody prefers the price of  £250- £350 for their spa experience in contrast 1 person choose option three ( £200- £300), which is second more expensive one. According to the table of second question of price section, Basic+Additional package are not on the preferred list of the people. On the other hand all inclusive and individual packages got the equal position of getting 50% response each, when responders answered about their preference about the packages. In term of services, restaurant, shopping outlets and beauty saloon are majoring in the main services offered by the Spa Hotel. 60% people have expressed that they would enjoy restaurant facilities most. Shopping outlets have come in second position with 30% while only 10% liked Beauty saloon. In the last question, people have been asked about whether they like to have outdoor facilities like cycling or climbing on a mountain offered by the spa hotel or not. 8 out of 10 people expressed the intention of joining either of the facilities. In contrast, only 2 people have denied to having them in their spa experience. Conclusion To sum up we can say that the opinion of peoples about the spa hotel defers in many ways but they have some similarities as well. One of them is they all like to have the experience of a Spa hotel. There are some restrictions that may be pointed out in this study, namely the fact of not having been highlighted a stricter age rank within the population and the samples dimension is somehow reduced. In terms of future threads of investigation, it would be interesting to cross the gender variable with age, income level, professional occupation and also to expand the same study to more than a country.

Mans Struggle with His Identity in Steppenwolf :: Hesse Steppenwolf Essays

Man's Struggle with His Identity in Steppenwolf      Ã‚  Ã‚   "The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." These are the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, among the most influential philosophers of the modern era and one who has exerted an incontrovertible influence on many German authors, including Hermann Hesse. That Hesse should feel drawn to a figure so prominent in the German consciousness is not suprising, that he should do so in spite of the religious zeal of his family seems almost heretical.    No less an influence on Hesse, though, was the groundbreaking psychologist Sigmund Freud, himself also an admirer of Nietzsche, and who "several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live." This theme, the "knowledge of self," is a recurring one in Hesse's works, and is central to the personal crises he faced in the years after the outbreak of World War I.    Hesse's post-1914 novels reflect his progress through successive self-examinations. Demian, published in 1919, explored his break with conventional morality in a decaying world. Siddhartha, published in 1922, features Hesse's lifelong fascination with Eastern spirituality. It was his 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, which first attained a complete break with the past while retaining an overtly autobiographical flavor amidst otherwise total abstraction.    It is Steppenwolf's break from the past which distinguishes it from the styles of two of Hesse's most prominent contemporaries: Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. While Mann and Kafka are themselves dissimilar, their novels are characteristic of the novel as a form: as totality. Mann's novels are intricately detailed and firmly situated within their historical contexts. Further, we are intimately familiar with the characters, with their backgrounds, their tastes, their values, and their fates. And while Kafka's novels are heavily symbolic, we are nevertheless presented with a total worldview, a worldview we can consider in all its irony and terror. Moreover, we can identify completely with the characters, who are really only reflections of ourselves, struggling for definition amidst ambiguity.    Hesse's Steppenwolf, conversely, is quintessentially fragmentary. We know little of Harry Haller beyond that which is immediately apparent from the text. We are as the nephew in whose aunt's boarding house Haller resides. We are also unable to identify the historical setting for the novel without referring to Hesse's own life.

The Great Gatsby :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was born on September 24, 1896. He later became one of the world known authors by having his books translated to different languages and printed.. He was often described as the drunken author, or the ruined novelists at the time. Yet, his books attract attention of people who have read his books that he has written. Fitzgerald used the American Dream, past relationships with love, and the people in his life, to create The Great Gatsby, that became one of the best books written during the Jazz Age.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  First of all, The Great Gatsby introduces more of the American Dream and hope of wealth. For example, when Fitzgerald was a youngster, he fantasized that he was rich and had a life of ease (Oxford 44). Fitzgerald’s dream for wealth and happiness was something that meant a lot to people of that time. He sees it as the key to his future, making life for him better. In addition, Fitzgerald’s omen was the loneliness of Gatsby pursuing his impossible dream (Kazen K2). Gatsby was rich, but his life wasn’t complete, he was missing something in his life. Soldiers of past wars enjoyed The Great Gatsby because of Gatsby’s dream and will. All in all, Fitzgeralds use of the American Dream was very successful.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Secondly, Fitzgerald used this experience with love to create emotion in his books. For instance, Fitzgerald was determined to win the heart of a young lady named Zelda (Oxford 46). He used this in The Great Gatsby to show the devotion of Gatsby’s love for Daisy. By doing so Fitzgerald creates a romantic theme in the story. Later in time, Fitzgerald found that Zelda was having an affair with another man (Oxford D7). Once he found out, his life was not the same anymore. He became an alcoholic full with problems in his life. I believe this is where Tom Buchannon’s relationship with Daisy became a reality to him. To sum it up Fitzgerald felt love and pain and expressed it in his works of literature.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Finally, Fitzgerald experienced influences throughout his life, which changed his future. Particularly, Father Sigourney Fay was the one who gave advice and wisdom to him (F. Scott Fitzgerald 679). Father Fay was someone who watched Scott and told him what was right and what was wrong in life. His advice and help gave Fitzgerald the sense to achieve high goals and dreams. In addition, he was successful as a novelist, but was corrupted by his lifestyle (F. Scott Fitzgerald 683).

Small Gods :: essays research papers fc

â€Å"Small Gods† The World rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo–European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off. Discworld is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot' (Pratchett, Terry. Equal p 216). Terry Pratchett is the author of a popular fantasy series that is set in Discworld, a planet that is as flat as a pancake. It sails on forever, a flat, circular world carried on the backs of four elephants supported on the back of A’tuin, the giant space turtle. The turtle doesn’t stand on anything, so don’t ask. It swims on through the infinite universe (Huckaby n.pag.). In his book Small Gods, Terry Pratchett succeeds in satirizing most of the world’s major religions and a few ancient political policies by expressing his thoughts and feelings through his own brand of humor and witticism. In the Discworld, there are a numerous amount of gods, powerful and weak. Small Gods takes a look into the realm of Ominia, a vast empire devoted to the Greater Glory of their god Om. The Gods of Discworld have a very unique power source. Their power depends upon having believers; a god with no believers fades into a powerless, wandering spirit or dies. The Great God Om has a powerful church, yet has only one real believer, a novice monk named Brutha. Drained of supportive power, he finds himself trapped in the body of an ordinary tortoise. Imagine the discomfiture a god might experience if confronted with some of the beliefs taught in his name -- and some of the "divinely inspired" actions taken by his followers as a result. Om, in his little tortoise shell, also comes to the disconcerting realization that, while his religion is vast and has many zealous worshippers, he has very few actual honest-to-Om believers. One, actually (Knapp n.pag.). Pratchett shows a struggle between a god and his religion, which no has no room for him. He shows a cynical side like most British humorists in that there may be religions existing whose god died out long ago from lack of belief.

Macroeconomic Situation Essay

The economic situation in the United States today could be considered as one of the deepest crisis the mankind has seen in so many years. The GDP growth rate of the country has decreased and ultimately got in the negative figures. The GDP growth rate in the year 2009 was -2. 4%, the inflation rate of the nation got around at 2. 2%. After the credit crisis and the subprime crisis, the overall economy was hampered with phases of rapid unemployment and bailouts for biggest financial sector companies. The overall trust in the service sector was reduced to a considerable level. The unemployment rate in April 2010 was estimated around at 9.9%. Due to continuous decrease in the growth rate of economy, the level of public debt also increased and reached $12. 28 trillion (January 2010) which is 84% of GDP. (â€Å"National Economic Accounts–nd†) But after the deep recession period, the economy is finally showing some signs of relief and recovery now. Though the expected growth rates are still negative, still the cumulative growth rates are expected to be better in the coming financial year. Provided the amount of the economic unscrambling the nation had witnessed in winter 2008-2009, the recovery pattern is still very weak, most importantly in persistent financial difficulties. The US congress and Federal Reserve have taken a number of steps in order to ensure that the current financial condition could be stabilized and active efforts could be made towards recovery and growth. The most extraordinary of those were producing a Primary Dealer Credit Facility and helping the acquisition of Bear Stearns by J. P. Morgan Chase. The Federal Reserve along with the Congress has continued to use the conventional macroeconomic tools in order to combat the current situation. (â€Å"The Current Economic Situation–nd†) The bailouts and government intervention into an otherwise free market are indications of such steps initiated by them. Taking account of the steps taken by Federal Reserve, the short term rates have fallen but still the amount of risk in the interbank loan market has not changed much over the time. References: The Current Economic Situation: Retrieved on 5th June 2010 from website: http://www. cbo. gov/ftpdocs/90xx/doc9078/Chapter2. 4. 1. shtml National Economic Accounts: Retrieved on 5th June 2010 from website: http://www. bea. gov/national/index. htm