TOW #24: Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich (IRB, written)

This week, i finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. Unlike the first half of the book where she bashes out about how positive thinking is ruining the society and there is nothing positive about positive thinking, she actually talks about how negative thinking has the same effect as positive thinking. She actually claims that neither positive nor negative thinking is good. She says that one sided thinking and partial thinking is detrimental. She tries to redeem herself from her previous invective on positive thinking by arguing that realism is what people actually need. Additionally, to address her point that positive thinking is not only harmful for cancer patients but also for every individual, she uses anecdote and exemplification. She first uses anecdote when explaining how positive thinking has destructive effects to cancer patients by giving them false hopes and taking away their ability to prepare for the harsh truth.  She claims that as a former cancer patient herself, going through cancer made her realize "an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate." In addition, she uses hypothetical exemplification to address her point that thinking positively is only detrimental. She explains, "you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.” With this hypothetical example, she makes readers realize that being clinical is what people need when looking at an issue. I personally think her arguments are a bit too harsh and radical. With topics like cancer, she needs to be more careful about the reader's feelings and how they would perceive her claims but she does not hesitate to outrageously claim that positive thinking gives patients false hopes. Although she did respond to counter arguments by claiming that negative thinking is also harmful, her methods were insufficient in settling the controversy of her argument.  If she did not note positive thinking, her arguments would have been less effective. She states that "we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of “negative” people" but this point of view is way too pessimistic for the audience to agree. 

TOW #23: Love by Lauren Sister (written, nonfiction text)

Some describe love as a flame, something that burns brightly and passionately for a given period of times but goes off eventually. Some also describe love as a magical thing that cannot be easily explained through reasoning. However, according to Lauren Sister, a journalist who has been researching the chemistry of love, love is a very mechanical thing that comes with its reasons. She claims that people have a tendency to be attracted to ones who have the qualifications that they lack, a innate tendency to produce the best offspring. Also, we fall for people who have the qualities our parents had, because “Love is reactive, not proactive, it arches us backward, which may be why a certain person just “feels right.” Or “feels familiar.”... He or she has a certain look or smell or sound or touch that activates buried memories” (31). To support her claim, she uses very scientific terms like oxytocin and neurotransmitters and builds her ethos. She also uses anecdotes to explain the stages of love. She claims that her husband and she fully experienced the burning flame of love. However, this is not the end of their love. It is the end of one stage of another love, and the beginning of another stage of their love.

Despite its practical mechanisms SIster tried to explain in her essay, love is still a magical and wonderful thing because the chance that one might meet another person who triggers one’s oxytocin, “a hormone that promotes a feeling of connection” (55) is rare and for the other person to feel the same feelings about one is even harder.

Her claims are definitely interesting and original but I personally felt as if she was being too finicky. I believe that some things in life can be beyond reason and do not believe that it is our objectives to discover every single detail in human life. There are benefits to knowing the mechanics behind love: If people knew that they would succeed in love with one or the other, there would be no failures or disappointments in relationships. However, it is because people fail, that we have population control and desires.

TOW #22: Campaign against drunk driving in Brazil (poster, visual text)

How intimidating can a mere can of beer get? In a drink driving campaign poster done by Fiat, the can of beer carries the scariest message that a driver could think of. The poster puts two pictures of a beer can right next to each other: the first one with the can unopen, and the second one with the can open. The first can, with its golden top reflects an image of someone riding a bicycle towards the can. On the top it says, “Agora Você Vê?”, which translates into “Now you see it.” On the second picture with the can open, the opening of the can blocks the reflection of the man riding the bicycle coming towards the can, and says, “Agora não”, meaning “Now you don’t.” This carries the meaning that when drivers drink even a can of beer, they would not see the surrounding pedestrians and thus precipitate a deadly accident. This very subtle image without any traces of blood or fatality carries the strongest and scariest message. This ad is especially significant because it was done by Fiat, an Italian automobile company and contains many brands like Ferrari, Maserati, Fiat, and Alfa Romeo. With this advertisement, Fiat could build its credibility among customers that it supports safe driving and wants to prevent car accidents that were due to drink and driving. In this advertisement. Fiat uses rhetorical devices such as juxtaposition and appeals to pathos. It uses juxtaposition by putting two very different images side to side, one that is very subtle and the other that carries a deadly message of possibly killing someone due to one’s own actions. With juxtaposition, Fiat also uses appeals to pathos. Fiat knows that drink driving accidents are done by people who doubt that they will be the ones who would actually get into car accidents when they drink and drive. Fiat successfully targets those people with the subtle juxtaposition. Fiat does not make things more dramatic by using bold colors or images; Fiat just tries to show the truth. This subtleness has more impact on the audience, as Fiat leaves the conclusion to the audience’s imagination.

TOW #21: The New Abolitionism by Christopher Hayes (written, non-fiction text)

The Civil War was a war not only of slavery, but of economy. By this, it means for Southern states, their loss would mean the loss of approximately 10 trillion dollars as they would lose their main work force, slaves. Hayes compares the modern issues of eliminating fossil fuels for the environment as those of slavery during the times of civil war at an economic level. Hayes asserts that the public would simply not risk ten trillion dollars just for the environment. Ultimately, Hayes is advocating for the stop of fossil fuel drilling, and he does it with uses of logos and by responding to possible counter arguments. He first uses logos to state that unlike slavery, which had some benefits for the economy as there was no input for the amount of labor they received, fossil fuels actually cost money as it is difficult to drill underground. He also addresses to investors to stop the investing for fossil fuels that investors “have reason to be suspicious of the fossil fuel companies. Right now, they are seeing their investment dollars diverted from paying dividends to doing something downright insane: searching for new reserves. Globally, the industry spends $1.8 billion a day on exploration” (Hayes, 50). Hayes explains how this is a waste of investment for investors as there is only limited supply of fossil fuels and the companies are only spending the investment on looking for new reserves. Hayes responds to possible counter argument that it is outrageous to compare anything to slavery by commenting “It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery... Humans are humans; molecules are molecules” (Hayes, 12). He adds that he is merely comparing the economy behind each issue. His argument was different from other environmental articles in that he did not purely argue for the environment and how fossil fuels can endanger the future Earth and how our next generations would not have a place to live as other nature advocates stress in their writings. He tried to make supporters of fossil fuels realize that the investment that they put in is actually a waste for them. He took a different direction in that he focused on what the supporters of fossil fuel actually care about: money. However, this could also have been his weakness. He did not put in any pathos, which could have weakened his argument towards the general public. But since his main audience was the investors, his argument was very effective.