Daily Journal #31

My job shadowing experience was one of the most fun things that I have done in a very, very long time. I went to the McClelland Aviation Company out at Springfield’s airport. It is a flight school and an airplane service company. We were supposed to shadow one of the flight instructors, but because he did not do much besides give lessons, we filled most of our time there with one of the linemen that worked there. The lineman’s name was A.J. and he was around 19 or 20 years old and he was a really cool person. His job was to prep the practice plane before the first flight which included fueling up the plane. He showed us how to fill it up and make sure everything was alright. After we filled up that plane, we went with him to go fill up some rich guy’s old T-28 that he flies in air shows across the country. Then it was time for their first flight lesson. It turned out that it was A.J. who would be getting trained and he was a lesson or two away from being able to go up in the plane by himself. This meant that the things they would be practicing were a little advanced. Elizabeth and I got in the plane and after everything was ready, we took off into the skies. First, he practiced very steep turns; we were turning almost completely sideways but there was enough centripetal force to keep us in our seats, and then some. Then came the best part, we heard him throttle down, and then he turned sharply up into a steep climb. Then alarms started to go off as we went slower and slower. Lucky for me, I knew that he was trying to stall the plane so he could practice how to get out of one, and the even better part was that Elizabeth did not know this and she also didn’t know that one the plane stalled, it would go into freefall before the pilot pulled out of it.

Daily Journal #29

The actual idea of Self itself is a very abstract and vague idea that Whitman proposes. While Self is in each one of us, it is also shared by everyone else, so it is not really a Self, rather a collective consciousness. Whitman breaks self down into a Trinity just like Christians do with their God; there is the spiritual self, the self-perceived self, and the actual self. The spiritual self is the part of Self represented by everyone’s abstract, unique personality and the different trends and similarities that people share across the world. The self-perception part of Self deals with how each individual person sees themselves and how they believe other people think of them as. The last and hardest to define part of Self is the Real Self. I think it is the hardest part to define from person to person because there are many different factors that affect how people perceive a person and it usually varies from how people perceive themselves. Whenever someone asks themselves “Who am I?” they are not talking about the self-perceived self because they already know how they see themselves; it is how everyone else sees them and what they are actually like. Finding out the Real Self requires one to look inward on their actions and how it might be seen by other people and also how their actions affect people around them. Since nobody is perfect and we live in a world with many other non-perfect people, the Real Self is mostly always different from the self-perceived self.

I know that, personally, the way I see myself is most likely different from how other people see me. Some of the things that I do may come across as odd to some people but as people get to know me and my sense of humor, it is easier to see why I do what I do. It is because of this that I try not to judge other people because I myself do not like to be judged.

Journal #30

I’ll be honest with you, the reason why I first chose this poem was simply because the fact that it had California in the name, and I dream one day of living in California, so this poem had an unfair advantage to be my favorite Whitman poem. I was happy and relieved to find out that it was also a shorter poem, compared to Song of Myself which was on par with the Iliad and Odyssey, and so I would be able to analyze it in a shorter amount of time and therefore being able to spend more time thinking about what it really means.

This poem, while being short, also holds a lot of meaning in its few lines. It is a poem that makes the reader a person looking west into the Pacific Ocean from a shore in California pondering the world beyond the range of their vision. Letting their imagination turn to the far off lands of the Asian continent and all of the different things it holds. People thought, as they do today, that mostly everything about Asia and North America are very different. Asia has had civilizations for a very long time, and America had been created not long ago, relative to the time civilizations in Asia had started. I think that this is how Whitman thinks about it because Whitman says “From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero” (Whitman 6). He also alludes to the fact that once the speaker is in Asia and then looks back home towards the East, they are “pleas’d and joyous” (Whitman 9). From there, he says at the end that he no longer knows where he started and wonders why it (where he started) has yet to be discovered. I think that this is about how people seem to want something different than what they have, and once they get it, they want what they used to have and can’t remember why they didn’t want it in the first place.

"The Walt Whitman Archive." FACING WEST FROM CALIFORNIA'S SHORES. (Leaves of Grass [1891-1892]) -. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. <http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/43>.

Daily Journal #28

While death is a very common occurrence in reality, most people do not like to think about it. Some cultures throughout history have embraced it and recognized its spiritual significance. While I typed those few short sentences, hundreds, if not thousands, of people died all across the Earth. With all of the feelings and emotions that come with death, at least for the ones left behind, tend to cause people to not want to dwell on the subject; to just “cross that bridge once we get there.” Even though death can be a bad thing in many, many ways, it is also the main force that drives us to achieve great things. The feeling that we have a relatively short time to accomplish all that we want to do helps keep us focused on doing the most that we can.

Living next to a cemetery, Emily defiantly had enough time to ponder the different aspects on death and how it affects people and how people see it. I think that Emily was not afraid of death; it seems that she understood that it will happen to everybody, so there is no need to fear it or give it a mystical premise. In this poem, a person is on their deathbed with their relatives gathered around in solemn anticipation of the person’s final breath. Each breath is compared to the “heaves of a storm” in between which the people waiting grow tense, for it could be the person’s last. Then, when everything seems to be ready, a fly buzzes into the speakers view, tearing asunder the veil of peace that pervaded the scene and while the person was distracted, they died. Even though this was a scene of death, Dickinson showed little emotion towards the situation, more of a somber narration of a true story. This poem is more about the psychological aspect of death and how a simple thing like a buzzing fly could ruin the “perfect” moment right before one passes on.

Daily Journal #27

Though I would much rather write about how Emily Dickinson’s poems often seem to go along to the tune in the theme song of “Gilligan’s Island,” it would be rather hard to reason why this was because of the fact that the television show came on much, much later than when Dickinson’s poems were published. Instead, I shall write about how many of her poems could be read to “Amazing Grace” which is much easier to relate to Dickinson because it was most defiantly around when Dickinson was writing her poems.

I do not find it all that surprising that a common tune in her poems was a hymnal because of her family background. She was raised in New England by wealthy Calvinists. It is no stretch to say that since her father was a Calvinist, she was also one, due to the fact that women had little freedom, even in the choice of their religion. Given the fact that she grew up hearing this hymnal, it comes as no surprise that she uses it to base some of her poems off of in terms of rhythm. It was something that she was very familiar with and one that many people would also be familiar with. This allowed for more people to enjoy her poetry because they would be able to read it to a tune that they heard all of the time when they went to church.

The ability to read literature to a beat or rhythm also allows the writer to impart more meaning and feeling without adding any more words. I can see how this would appeal to Emily Dickinson because she was a writer that was very concerned and careful how she worded things so that all of the feeling she was trying to express would come out in a meaningful and eloquent way. By choosing “Amazing Grace,” she gives the poem more of a smooth and mellow feeling while different tunes could help her express everything that she is trying to get across to the reader.

Daily Journal #26

Since we are able to understand the concepts of right and wrong, humans are taught that there are certain rules that they are to live by for the rest of their lives. They vary from place to place, but they are the same at their core. There are common sense ones like “Do not kill” and “do not steal” and such things as that. Then there is another “class” that involves things that keep people from doing anything that would negatively affect other people; such as rules regulating driving and trespassing laws. The purpose of laws is to improve the lives of everybody by providing a structured code that everybody lives by. This gives people the sense of security by providing them with the knowledge that there are rules out there to protect them.

Now, as to the question of when it would be acceptable to break the law, there are two possible ways to look at this. There are times when it is socially acceptable to break the law and there are times when it is morally acceptable to break the law. The laws that are commonly broken that could be classified as socially acceptable would be ones like speeding, doing drugs, underage drinking, other related things. Then there are rules that are, by some, seen as morally acceptable to break. For instance, there are many people who do not morally believe that the law against polygamy, so they do not follow it, and accept the consequences when they are caught. I do not think that there should be laws prohibiting things like that because it challenges people’s legitimate moral beliefs, and makes them choose with abiding by the law and abandoning their morals or living by what they truly believe in but getting in trouble for it. Other similar laws are ones banning gay marriage or abortions. There is always an extent to which laws should be followed; like if it’s an emergency, laws are sometimes a hindrance against the solution, and therefore should be able to be broken without consequence.

Daily Journal #25

Fear is a very important psychological factor that plays into mostly everybody’s lives. It is all around us. Fear is very evidently present in the modern media; they use it to scare people into thinking things that they would normally not give much thought to. The use of fear to persuade people is becoming more and more common now that we are getting close to our next presidential election. There are few campaign ads that I have seen that did not use fear to try to sway the targeted constituents into siding with whomever the ad is for.

I think that the reason why fear is such an effective tool against people’s minds is that above all else; above happiness, sadness, or contentedness, every human being has the sense of self preservation. Fear is at the center of the feeling to keep oneself safe from danger; the fear of doing something that is going to negatively affect one’s life in some way shape or form. When someone is convinced that something is going to harm them, they try their very best to avoid it.

Fear can also be a good way at putting one’s problems into perspective. For example, when someone has a near- death experience, they, for the most part, change something about their lives because they now fear that they might not live much longer. Fear, instance, can be used to motivate people to accomplish the things that they want to do because the fact that they do not want to die without fulfilling their dreams.

Fear can also be very persuasive. This is evident in the different kinds of torture that engage in making the fear more excruciating pain or death. When someone is afraid for their life, they will most likely do anything that could help them escape from the situation.

Fear is often used to misconstrue the truth in order to persuade people, like in the example of political campaign ads that I had mentioned earlier.

Daily Journal #24

When I was little, as with most little kids, I was easily scared. For some unknown reason, I was deathly afraid, at least during the night, that a burglar would break into my house and start to steal all of my things. When he would continue to look for more of my family’s things to take, he would come into my room. Upon seeing that I was still home, he would freak out because he did not want to get caught. He would become irrational and, without thinking, he would kill me. I know, it is a pretty weird thing for a kid to think of, but I did, and it seriously freaked me out.

Now that you have that pretext, I can tell you about a time that I legitimately thought that that exact situation was going to happen to me. Me and my dad were asleep, and in the middle of the night, I thought I heard a noise, so I did what every other did does when they get scared in the middle of the night; I ran into my dad’s room. Now that I look back, that first noise was probably just my house. I have an old house that creaks whenever it gets cold in the night, so it was most likely just that. Since I already had the mindset that someone was in my house, it definitely did not help that shortly after I ran into my dad’s room that I heard a loud bang come from my garage. Now that definitely was not my house creaking again. With the first noise and then this second, very loud noise, it is no stretch to say that I was very, very scared. My dad also heard the noise, so he told me to stay in the bed and he would go look to see what the noise was.

After he left, I was convinced that he was going to be gotten by whoever was in the garage, so that did not help my fear. Of course, he came back up after about 45 seconds and it turns out it was just a paint can that fell over in the garage.

Daily Journal #23

It seems like every scary movie that comes out has the same kind of base template. Sure, the story line and kind of characters change, but at the core, they are all mostly the same. Whether it is a zombie movie, an exorcism movie, one about a murderer, or one about aliens; they are all the same. They all present a situation at the beginning of the movie that seems realistic so that you sympathize with the characters and you imagine yourself in their shoes, adding to the scare factor later in the movie. Then they start to show the little things that make up the building actions of the story. These add to the suspense and psychological effects because they are just little bits of weird things that creep you out, but not really scare you. They also set up for the next part of the story. Then they start the climax of the movie, which is where they start all of the really creepy scenes or all the suspenseful scenes one after another. This usually begins with an unexpected action which scares people.

Along with suspense, scary movies like to use music to help make the scenes even scarier. Sometimes the music heralds the scary scene that is coming soon, or it is kept calm before a surprising scene to help keep its element of surprise. Another thing that scary movie directors tent to favor is using themes in their movies that strike at the deepest fears of their viewers. The fears like what is lurking in the darkness while they are sleeping or maybe what would happen if some crazy escape convict found their house and he kidnapped their whole family or something along those lines. When people start to visualize themselves in these situations, they are easily scared because they are basically living out what would happen if they were ever in one of those awful situations, which I guess is why they like it.

Daily Journal #22

All of the kids love to play in the snow

They wake up to the blinding sparkling white

They run down the stairs and get ready to go

They put on their coats to prevent the bite

They rush out of the door into the wind

They go to grab their worn out beaten sleds

They go to find the hill with the big bend

The snow falls gently on their wool capped heads

Their small hearts pound in their chest as they run

They reach the spot they had been searching for

Now at the top, they shoot off like a gun

They hit a bump and know they will be sore

But they keep going and going all day

Up then down, and then back up to the top

They do not notice the sky has turned grey

They notice the change in time; time to stop

Their fingers and toes have no more feeling

They have slowly been chilled deep to the bone

Now it’s back to the warmth for its healing

They walk into the door and hear the phone

Now it’s time for the hot chocolate

Warming themselves deep in their soft bedding

Feeling happy finding the thrill they sought

Looking forward to more days of sledding 

Daily Journal #21

The rolling hills, once alive with the wanderings of cattle, the innocent frolicking of children, and the silent persistence of the beautiful flowers and grass, are now covered in a thick blanket, one that extends for as far as the eye can see. The trees, now just skeletons of their former beauty and size, spring forth from the unyielding cover. The flakes are falling gently from the sky so that they just barely come to a rest on an outstretched hand. Each flake robust flake different from the rest, yet all so light and delicate. The unending white stretched out in all directions. The brilliant white of the snow reflects the sun back and is nearly blinding, especially when first coming out from indoors. The snow is a single undisturbed layer, except for some of the spots where a dear or bird looking for their food has left their mark to be filled in. The product of a few seeds, this cold and barren season will be over when the sorrow of the Harvest has been abated. The frozen river once churning and always changing, now is solid, predictable. The absolute silence and stillness is a calming comfort. The warmth of your breath is suddenly visible, billowing out every time you exhale. Off in the woods, far from any house or town, a herd of deer scour the forest floor for a little bit of still green grass to satisfy their hunger. Cardinals flit by, fast as a flash, easy to see against the bland background, like a drop of blood on a piece of paper. Most birds have since left in search of warmth, leaving the skies empty and the woods quiet. The dry, crisp air stings ones lungs, yet it invigorates like nothing else. People are bundled up in their heaviest coats. A large hill will most likely be carved out with the tracks of many sleds, boot prints littering the ground about it.

Daily Journal #20

From the very opening of the poem “Autumn” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, it is obvious that it is a definite writing of the Romanticism time period. The “romantics” are known to write a lot about nature and be very descriptive in doing so. Seeing how this is a whole poem describing in a very poetic way.

The opening sentence, “Thou comest, Autumn, heralded by the rain, with banners, by great gales incessant fanned, brighter than brightest silks of Samarcand, and stately oxen harnessed to thy wain!” (Longfellow: Lines 1-4). The way that he talks about autumn makes it seem like autumn is a tangible thing; more of a human being or some kind of spirit rather than just a season.

Longfellow goes on to praise Autumn of how it answers the prayers of the farmers; “Thy steps are by the farmer’s prayers attended” (Longfellow: Line 11). This is also a characteristic of the Romanticism time period because they tended to show the “good” side of nature, the side that nourishes and protects the people and animals of the earth.

Longfellow also compares the sheaves of grain that the farmers have harvested to “flames upon the altar!” (Longfellow: Line 12). This shows how the authors, at least Henry Longfellow, in the Romanticism time period liked to raise up the virtues of hard work that the farmers of America show. The frequent use of the exclamation points shows that the author is very emotional about the subject. This excitedness about nature is a very token characteristic of the romanticism period.

The imagery that Longfellow uses in further personifying autumn in lines five through nine give the reader that Longfellow felt that he had a very close relationship with nature, and how he saw nature during autumn: “Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne, upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand outstretched with benedictions o’er the land, blessing the farms through all thy vast domain! Thy shield is the red harvest moon.”

Also, the fact that the speaker of the poem is talking directly to nature makes the reader feel closer to nature because they are able to talk to it, not just talk about it.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Horace E. Scudder. Boston and New 

York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1893; Bartleby.com, 2011.

Daily Journal #19

The cycle of life and death is a very important topic for humans. Peoples of the past have always been fascinated by the idea of death, and I have a feeling that it will continue to interest people for the rest of our existence. Death is one of the only things that we can not research in any way. We can see the physical effects after someone has died, but when a person dies, only they know what death is really like, and by then, it is too late for them to prove or disprove any theory for the people still living. Different religions have tried to predict what happens after a person dies. Christians think that there is a soul and that it goes either to heaven or hell, depending on how the person acted in their life. Then there are religions like Hinduism that teach that the soul of any living thing gets reincarnated into another living being in a cycle until the soul is “good” enough to enter nirvana, their version of heaven. Then of course there are atheists, which believe that nothing happens after you die, there is no soul or any kind of spiritual afterlife. Most atheists are scientists who do not see any proof that there is a soul or afterlife.

In any instance, people are fascinated with the idea of death. Most are scared of it because it presents a situation that we have no control over; it happens to everybody and there is no way to escape it. The fact that nobody knows for sure whether or not there is an afterlife or not also adds to the fear people feel when they think about death.

In my personal opinion, I think that people should not concentrate so much on the differences between their beliefs and just live life to make it better for yourself, everybody else that is currently alive, and for the people that come after us.

Daily Journal #18

The perfect autumn day would be the best day in the year, better than the best spring day, better than the best summer day, and most definitely better than the best winter day. It would be around seventy degrees outside, but it would feel a little bit colder due to the light breeze sweeping through the forests. This little bit of wind would be enough to kick up the rustling leaves on the ground. You would be able to walk outside and hear the distant sounds of someone using a leaf blower to round up the fluttering leaves into a pile so that his children could play in them. You could smell the distinct smell of a fire burning old logs for a bonfire. You could also smell, mixed in with the light smoke, a stronger smell of a charcoal fire; someone is starting up a family cookout. You could hear dogs barking and children laughing as they played fetch and the children jumping into the piles of leaves that their fathers had made them shortly before. You could hear the rustling of the dead leaves still on the trees as the tops of the trees swayed with the wind. Even with all of the noises and the smells, it still feels calm and serene. You can almost feel the trees preparing for their long slumber through the cold and harsh winter, but they do not seem to resent it nor fight it, they just accept it as the way things go. You can also see, in the trees and on the ground, the various animals who are also preparing for the winter. The squirrels are collecting and hiding their acorns and they are also building their new houses in the trees for their families. The flocks upon flocks are flying south to escape the cold clutches of winters grip, and we are bundling up and watching everything around us happen in quiet attentiveness.

Daily Journal #17

There have many times that I can remember where I bonded with nature. When I was a bit younger, maybe somewhere back in the early 2000’s, I was in the boy scouts. As you probably already know, boy scouts go out all the time to go camping and go hiking and things like that. The main point of doing those things was that we were able to bond with nature and see the beauty in just natual, untoughed nature.

We went camping all the time at different places. I enjoyed camping very much because it gave me a chance to relax and enjoy the simple thing in life. Nature has a very calming effect, and it is hard not to feel bonded to nature when you are sleeping outside. I think that this has to do with people in the modern world connecting sleeping outside or in tents with people who came before us, like the Native Americans. Most people, or at least it seems like most people do this, connect the Native Americans and people like them to having a very deep and spiritual connection with nature. Their religions were based off of nature and they used it for everything they wanted and needed. They tried to be as nice as possible to it because they realized the importance of trying to keep nature as pure as possible. Then the Europeans came along and we started to tear down forests to make way for our cities. Now, when the forests of the world and the untouched wilderness’ dwindling, people are trying to hold on to the last bit of true nature that we still have.

The writers of the romanticism period could see the kind of path that we were going down and they wanted to stop it before it progressed too far, but now it is obvious that it did not go as they had wanted.

Daily Journal #16

There are many different kinds of media available to people in modern society due to the fact that almost everybody now has computers. This fact opens up many different channels through which people can communicate with other people. It used to be that people separated by great distances could not communicate other than letters or a phone call, but now, with the help of computers, there are now many different kinds of long distance communication that greatly improve efficiency.

One of the most popular ways that people communicate now is through text messaging each other. If they have a question they need to ask their research partner, they just text them and they get a response right away. Another very useful tool and one that is increasing in popularity is skype, or any kind of web cam chatting program. This allows people to meet face to face, no matter how far apart they are, as long as they both have computers. They can talk and chat, which allows the exchange of ideas to flow faster, and they can also send each other links to websites that would be helpful with their project or they could send them a document like a powerpoint presentation or a word document so that the other person gets it right away, not just when they check their email next.

I think that advances in technology have expanded the area that people that someone would be able to work with. If there were a person in your research group in England, it would be no problem. You could communicate with them as if they were your next door neighbor. This project on Franklin’s virtues will let us get a taste of what we might have to do once we get into college and we will be prepared and skilled at communicating efficiently with people over a long distance.

Daily Journal #15

There are many problems that arise when working with people over a long distance. It will be a challenge working with the kids from Farmington for our Franklin virtue project. There is a possibility for many different kinds of communication issues.

There was this one project in my freshman year in introduction to engineering taught by Mr. Andrew Stevenson (I miss him). We were tasked with working with another school, whose name escapes me at the moment, in creating a new kind of locker shelf. We had to discuss different ideas that we thought would work, decide what we wanted to do, and then we had to come up with our final idea. One person in our group had to draw up our final product in Autodesk Inventor and then we had to have a final project where we presented it to our classes. This project is very similar to the one that we are doing now because we have to collaborate with another school over using any kind of media that we could.

Also, let’s be honest, you and I both know that I am turning this blog post in late, and I apologize. One good thing about doing this particular blog late is that I now know what kind of problems that arose during my project. The only real problem that I noticed was that some people did not check their emails that often, so it was hard to stay in touch with them the entire time. One of the best ways that I found to stay in touch with most of my group members was facebook. Whether it is a good thing or not, people tend to check their facebook all the time. If it is somewhere in plain sight, it is usually the best way to communicate with people, which is now facebook or some other kind of social media.

Daily Journal #14

If I were alive during Franklin’s time period, it would be much different than what my life is like now. There was no indoor plumbing, cars, or electricity. If I were to be alive during the time period I would want to be the apprentice of Benjamin Franklin. This is because I am the type of person that likes science, and Benjamin Franklin was a very notable scholar and inventor. He invented many things from a popular stove to lightning rods. He also just seems like a very enjoyable person to be around. From his writing, I can tell that he is not that mean of a person and he has a good sense of humor, which would make it easier to be his apprentice.

My typical day would probably be getting up early (because it seems to me that everybody got up early then, then I would go to school. I think that if Benjamin Franklin were to actually have an apprentice, I would think that he would want one that could read, write, and one that would be good at problem solving as to help Benjamin when he needed some help on something. After getting out of school, I would go help Benjamin Franklin at his printing house for the remainder of my day, except for some time to go home and study what I learned in school today.

It is hard to imagine what life was like back then. To us, it seems very strange, but to them, it seems perfectly normal; they do not know any other life than the one that they were living then. I bet if they came to the future, to our time, they would think it was just as weird as we think theirs is. It is all about the perspective.

Daily Journal #13

I do not think that the “American Dream” has changed much over the last several decades, maybe even farther than that. Most people came to America from Europe to start a new life; to get at chance to make a name for themselves in a new frontier. The same could be said about recent times. Many people want to invent something new, and now with the new frontier that modern technology brings us, it opens up many opportunities for people to make money and a legacy. At the root of most people’s dreams for their futures, no matter how grand and seemingly unobtainable they appear to be, there is always a want to find a spouse, have kids, be able to provide for their family, and to leave something behind that they want to be remembered by. This is evident in the kind of people that are celebrities in America today. Most of them are not great scientific or philosophic minds. Instead, most of them are wealthy people, well, there is also the kind of celebrity that does ridiculous stunts to get the attention on them, but that is a totally different topic for another blog.

One good example as to why this is what the “American Dream” is, is the way that somebody becomes a celebrity. Even though Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both great inventors, they were not very well known until they started their companies and started to acquire their large amount of wealth. Most people that go to college aspire to use what they study in the future to change the world for the better.

The only difference between the American dream of today’s society and one of a few generations ago, there is a different standard of being “Successful”. In today’s world, with the more and more of the wealth being controlled by a certain few, and therefore creating wealthy people even wealthier, to focus has seemed to shift more off of getting a job so one’s able to provide for their family to being getting as much money as one can in their life, which is not always the best thing, because “Money can’t buy you happiness.”

Daily Journal #12

Well, this is an odd question to ask. There are many different directions I could take this. Well, obviously I’m going to take the route that gives me the most words so that I can finish this blog as fast as I can. If I were to write my own rules for what was right and what was wrong, it would look fairly similar to what they are currently. I think that you should basically be able to do whatever you wanted, as long as it did not infringe upon anyone else’s rights. I think that would cover most things like murder, theft, and things like that. I think that eventually I would change my rules a little by little until they are basically the same as they are now just because of the fact that I believe that the rules that people make are ones that every person thinks are fair rules just because it is the way that most people think. Granted, there are a few crazy people out there that would not agree with some of the rules that are only there to protect them, but that will always happen. It is simply human nature to want to set up a set of rules and guidelines as to help us discern right from wrong. Most people would agree that there would be no murder, no stealing, nothing like that, which shows that rules for some things don’t have to be written down or explicitly stated for people to believe. There are some more intricate things that would need their own rules due to their complex nature. Thinks like how banks should act and how we should handle our economy and other complicated things that do not fall into whether or not it hurts someone else, directly, or indirectly.

I think that businesses should be required to pay all of the taxes that they are supposed to, especially big businesses that make billions every year but they somehow manage to slip through some loopholes *cough* G.E. *cough*cough*.