Visionary essay blog

I wrote my essay on Benjamin Franklin. We all know him as the person who discovered electricity but the most inspirational thing about him is his passion for writing. "His love for writing showed us that he was a creative visionary. He went from writing secrete letters for his brothers newspaper as a child to owning his own newspaper and writing a very successful almanack as an adult." (my essay quote)
i got most of my information about Benjamin Franklin from the website http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/ . This is a very useful source that helped me write my paper about Benjamin Franklin. There are autobiographies, biographies, and other helpful information about him.
-Hannah Potter-

Theodor Seuss Geisel

When you think of Dr. Seuss you probably think of rhyming books that sometimes may not make any sense at all. However, I bet you didn't know that many of Dr. Seuss' books were written in order to help both adults and students with events that were happening during Seuss' time. I found this to be very interesting because I never would have linked books like The Lorax to the environment or Yertle the Turtle to Hitler, "Hitler was an important person in Dr. Seuss' life, not in a good way of course, and so it was only fair that he write a book that was about Hitler in a kid friendly language so that they would better understand what was going on". Dr. Seuss had 2 main goals during his writing career. The first was to help children with everyday events with the use of humor and the second was to make reading fun and enjoyable for the children.

The source that had a lot of good information about Dr. Seuss was the book called Dr. Seuss, by Koekholl and Kallen. http://www.amazon.com/Inventors-Creators-Boekhoff-Stuart-Kallen/dp/0737709979/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327332057&sr=1-1

Walt Disney

Walt Disney is a very inspirational person. He built an empire of movies from basically nothing. Walt worked very hard throughout his life to accomplish such an amazing dream.He made so many movies that he noted were for "children of all ages". To me "this meant that he had animated cartoon like movies for the younger children that older children or even adults would enjoy"! I think he is a very inspirational person because he had a dream to produce long films in addition to his short ones. His first attempt at making a series of comedies was not successful. However, this did not stop him. He continued to pursue his dream and eventually came out on top of the entertainment world. That is what makes him an inspiration to me. For this paper, I found an interent article that was very helpful. It was a biography on Walt Disney that told everything that you would ever need to know about him. This is where I found most of the information that I needed.

http://www.justdisney.com/walt_disney/biography/long_bio.html

In The Presence of Fear

I thought that the best passage was passage XVII that says, "In a time such as this, we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be greatly threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult." I liked this because his point of having war in order to end war is really what a lot of people believes needs to happen for peace. That is not true because no matter how much people hurt us or try to be our enemies we should still love them and not fight.

In the presence of fear

The most thought provoking passage in the book is XX. This passage says, "If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual war to end war" (Berry 7). The passage shows how victory over a war only leads to more violence and not peace.

In the presence of fear

If you turn over the book you see the quote "the time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of septermber 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day". This quote provokes a lot of thought in my head. This makes me think of about how the united states is incredibly proud and i can speculate that most americans were not afraid of anything knowing that we were the most powerful people in the world and that no one would mess with us. Our power as a world economy and being one of the most highly developed country made us believe that we were invincible, and that view was changed by a few terrorists. This made me think a lot about how september 11th changed our country and the people that live in it

In the Presence of Fear

The most provoking and worthy discussion in the book is passage VII. The passage says "We did not anticipate anything what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and dangers that we had ignored" (Berry 3). The passage shows how technology has overtaken our society and how technology can affect the way people act. Just think September 11th happened with airplanes in which were created to travel across the country. What would have happened that day if airplanes did not exist? Do you think the towers would have been attacked if airplanes were never invented. We live in a society where technology is everything. One day, technology may take over the world.