Author: SONGQIANG RUAN

The strategy that I chose was number 5, “to restructure your essay and discover new ideas in the process”. When I first wrote my essay I felt overwhelmed, I couldn’t seem to get a good handle on the structure of my essay and the content wasn’t ordered neatly and clearly, so I re-listed them and chose to order what I thought was more important to write about so that I could understand what I was saying and so that the reader could understand what I was saying. I also needed to make the sources I chose relate in some way to the work I chose, to make them easier to understand and to uncover more things to think about. Now that I have a general direction on how to connect these sources and works, I just need to focus on the sources I need to use.

1. The connection Reid makes between the 1978–1992 “austerity period” at CUNY and the COVID-19 pandemic is the social distress that resulted from the particular policy. The international oil crisis of 1973 and the defeat of the U.S. military in Vietnam in 1975 ushered in a comprehensive privatization policy that was ostensibly designed to protect New York City from even more intense economic devastation and subsequent bankruptcy, but which oppressed ordinary people in many ways. The government eliminated free college education, leaving students to shoulder the burden of tuition, and they fired at least 5,000 teachers to save money. People already without food and housing security are now in increasing danger of unemployment and eviction. There are also many workers and teachers who have been laid off during today’s pandemic, and many are also facing an even greater crisis because they cannot afford the various debts.

2. Reed uses the term “death cult” to represent the effects of those privatizations that took away the progress CUNY made in the 20th century and made it necessary for everyone to work again. This has no effect on those who have money, but it adds to the burden of poor students. Students study on the premise of cheapness, which is the most important point. It takes away many opportunities and kills the hopes of many NYC students. Privatization has replaced many things, and the government’s focus has slowly shifted to money and power.

3. Reed suggests that anti-racism and anti-austerity groups need to come together faster and more decisively and develop a series of strong and effective protest movements that will allow them to be strong enough as a group to defeat anyone who stands in their way. Reed suggests that you not just follow orders in silence but think for yourself, actively seize every opportunity to share useful information and ideas with each other and then expand those ideas into the community.

https://jamboard.google.com/d/1TCXvwLTYr0SNvZ4dsOjrr6RF_WNPWi5YPnKh3nRsLAg/edit?usp=sharing

After reading the article “Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Limits of Representation” by Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor, I was able to deeply I was able to deeply feel the divide that exists between people. In a society where different people represent different things, the “limits of representation” are found in the race and status of people, not just as individuals, but as a group. The article mentions that “In the 2016 Presidential election, Black voter turnout declined for the first time in twenty years, dropping from sixty-seven to sixty percent. Black women are, in general, one of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in the United States.” which reflects how Black women are not valued, at least At the political level, there is so little they can say and so little they can do to change the outcome. It’s unrealistic to expect the government to go all in on helping poor people, and they have no way of understanding the social pressures on people in struggle, so there is little expectation that people at the top will naturally understand the plight of poor women, which has led to long-standing complaints about the influence of money on politics. Although Obama has done his best to contribute to this group in the past, it still hasn’t improved very much in the back, so there have been criticisms in society that he hasn’t done enough, and at least for now, what politicians are doing in this area does still fall short.

 

1,After reading Greg Bordowitz’s “Pandemic Haiku”, it resonated with me more deeply. The author has divided the words into many different parts, and the content is basically related to the epidemic we are facing, and each part can make me feel different inner activities. The sentences are concise but cool and you can’t stop thinking about them. During the epidemic people felt different emotions such as pain, grief, despair, sadness, etc. People were unable to explore the beautiful world outside and had to stay at home and look forward to the end of the epidemic. It is like a tomorrow without hope, which makes people feel infinitely bleak.

2. This poem illustrates much of the situation we are in today, and it also reveals the author’s concern. People are living like machines during the epidemic, dull and drab, with no hope in sight. The poem also speaks of the many effects of the epidemic on people, as well as the questions and frustrations about the current response, which has forced people to rethink these issues.

3, we can see how art can have an impact on social or political issues, and it does so in a refreshed way so that more people can see what the author is trying to say. The author is using his voice to pour out more about the epidemic so that others can relate to it in order to achieve the goal of changing other people’s minds and making changes for it.

After checking the first and second paragraphs of my draft, I found many sentences with commas, including one simple sentence, three complex sentences, and nine compound sentences. the structure of the sentences is very important and largely determines the reader’s experience. Using overly simple sentences may make the essay look poorly written, but using too many complex sentences can lead to confusion for the reader, so it is best to use both simple and complex sentences in your essay to make it neat and organized and easy to understand. I was a little surprised by the sentences I used, because I used a lot of complex sentences, even though it might make my essay complicated. I usually think of a general framework and start writing, because I don’t really like to delete everything and start over, which is very inefficient. Even though it’s just a draft, I still write it as if it were a formal article. When I go back and check it, if there are no huge mistakes, then I don’t have to spend a lot of time revising for that. Maybe I’ll choose to add some simple sentences so that my subsequent articles will allow the reader to better understand what I’m saying. I think revising sentence patterns is an exercise for my own writing, which can enhance my writing skills. But I will most likely keep my own style, which is something different for everyone. I also think I need to shorten some of these sentences to make them more impactful.

The increasing severity of global warming makes human society more and more unstable, the temperature rises, and climate disasters have made people’s ordinary life an unprecedented impact. In both articles, it is stated that the flooding has forced most people to evacuate from some coastal areas, and they are forced to sell their houses because they are unwilling to bear the economic damage after the disaster. In addition to the individual who can afford it, most of them think that this is something that will happen sooner or later. Even though the government has promulgated a series of solutions and disaster insurance, etc., there are still people who are unwilling to take this high risk. Clearly, both articles focus on one salient point, the incomparable importance of race to housing. The article “New Yorks Invisible Climate Migrants” by Sophie Kasakove mentions “They are some of the only places where homeownership is attainable for middle-class families, particularly for black families: In 2017, in Canarsie and neighboring Flatlands, 62 percent of the population identified as black and the homeownership rate was 57 percent, the highest of any neighborhood in Brooklyn. Homeowners in areas affected by Sandy were foreclosed upon at twice the rate of those in similar neighborhoods elsewhere in the U.S., according to an Urban Institute study published in April. And the rate was higher in areas where a majority of residents were nonwhite.” In this case, the choice of black families has become particularly difficult, and the government’s policies have not been able to help them, and they have also become victims of profit. Another article makes a similar claim: “the erosion of rights, the politics of nonraciality beneath which, as David Theo Goldberg has argued, lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday and persistent institutional and structural racisms — and racial capitalism. Global warming and its consequences for the peoples of the South is a political question and must be understood outside of the limits of “climate change” and in the context of the inequalities produced by racial capital.” They are well aware that this is a historic political issue, but no one wants to change it, especially from the aftermath of climate change, where we can see a lot of disputes of interests, and many of these black communities are neglected and underdeveloped , and the government just let them take care of themselves. Obviously, these are some of the darkest conditions of this age.