What Is The Tone Of The Unknown Citizen

Thomas Jefferson once said that “Everyone has the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If the government spied on its citizens, the citizens would carry the burden of having the government constantly watch every move being made, interfering with citizens pursuit of happiness. With that being said, if a citizen’s privacy was invaded then their pursuit of happiness would be demolished. The government should not be able to spy on its citizens because it is a major invasion of privacy, people become fearful of the government, and is a large violation of the rights citizens are permitted.

The book Soul of a Citizen by Paul Loeb makes a compelling case for civic engagement. The book emphasizes the need for people to get involved in civic life and it gives examples of people who made a huge impact just by deciding to do. These people saw something that was not right and they went out of their way to help. However, it was not size but they made up their mind that this was what they were going to do and went about doing it. They did not know that by doing that they were going to make a huge impact but they ended up making a huge impact and creating change. Just as these people did, I believe that everyone can engage in civic change and make a different. In this paper, I am going to discuss ways an average citizen can engage in civic life, ways that social worker can encourage others to get involved in civic life and why is it important for social workers to serve in this role.

“A citizen is a political and moral agent who in fact has a shared sense of hope and responsibility to others and not just to him or herself” (Henry Giroux). A good citizen will not only wish for the better of themselves and their loved ones, but also of the entire world as well. A good citizen will stand up for what they consider important. As the quote by Giroux states, it is a responsibility to others as well, as the brave citizen is doing the entire community a favor as well. The analysis included in this paper will allow a reader to fathom what it means to bring change about, to get one’s voice heard, and to stand up for one’s beliefs, hopes and desires. This paper will be proceeded in a manner that not only summarizes the key ideas presented in Soul of Citizen, but also a connection to past events, along with present events and incidents.

We spend our entire lives trying to figure out who we are, and as much as we all would like to believe we start with a blank slate, that simply isn’t the case. Some of us are born with, albeit slightly hidden, marks of what our history already dictates for us. Racial perception in society has always been a topic of controversy throughout the entire nation. Based on past occurrences, it has been proven that black and brown people as a whole have been oppressed, mistreated, and even wrongfully persecuted based on social stigmas conceived by society. Society today have the wrong ideologies; they believe that a safer environment means locking away individuals that appear to be a menace or danger based on the color of their skin. However, this mentality is flawed because locking up individuals does not promote a change; it only increases hate and eliminates the chance for someone to change their ways and become a better person. In the novel “Citizen” by Claudia Rankins the poem “In Memory of Trayvon Martin”, “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, alongside the video situation 6, both conveyed that racism is prevalent in the modern world today as one should take to account the toll of microaggressions on the political and personal standpoint of equality for all colored individuals.

Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” (Harrison Bergeron, 1.) The idea behind this opening paragraph is to show how ridiculous government powers have become, as well as warn people that governments are increasingly taking over the freedom and personal attributes of the individual. The same argument and ridicule can be found expressed in the short story “Welcome to the Monkey House.” Vonnegut introduces the absurd control the government has over the individual in the fictitious society by stating “So the world government was making a two-pronged attack on overpopulation. One pronging was the encouragement of ethical suicide, which consisted of going to the nearest Suicide Parlor and asking the Hostess to kill you painlessly while you lay on a Barcalounger. The other pronging was compulsory ethical birth control.” (Welcome to the Monkey House, 30.) As a satirist, Vonnegut goes where others don’t dare; he satirizes the future in a cautionary manner to express concern for the possibility of future government power.

The poem’s structure channeled bountiful information regard the complex emotions within the narrator. The poem started with the word “and” and followed the word “suddenly.” A time sequence is suggested here. It is believed that the speaker tells his

Personal rights for the citizens of our country are guaranteed by the Constitution of The United States of America, and this poem illustrates direct disregard for those rights. “You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet” (lines 13 – 15) shows the disregard for personal rights. Nearly everyone carries a wallet and that statement says the personal right to be innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply to certain people as the government sees fit. In lines 16 – 17, “It’s not our obligation to inform you of your rights” contradicts to the law of having Miranda Rights read to an individual upon arrest. Further showing they can disregard a person’s rights as they feel necessary, the poem

Citizenfour is a documentary in which Laura Poitras starts receiving strange anonymous e-mails from a man that called himself by the name of "CitizenFour," that’s why the documentary is named that way. This anonymous guy said that he had evidence of illegal monitoring programs held by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ and many others agencies working worldwide. Months later after that, she and 2 guys named Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill (which are reporters) fly all the way to Hong Kong in order to meet with this anonymous citizenfour man. When they got there, they found out that the man turned out to be Edward Snowden. Throughout the rest of the film, Edward or “citizenfour” starts to reveal all the shocking information he has. This film not only brings to

Auden’s poem is a criticism of human perceptions and how we use them to detect, or suppress human suffering. In the first half of the poem Auden “compares versions of indifference by portraying youth and age, animals, and humans” (Shmoop, 2014). In the first few lines of the poem, Auden comments on the perceptions of the “Old Masters” and how they were never wrong in their discernment of suffering. He then compares the old masters perceptions to the perceptions of children and animals and how they are unaware of,

Edward Snowden exposed NSA’s illegal surveillance in June 2013, this brought about controversial discussions inside America and all around the world. However, we stay oblivious how this thirty-year-old school dropout advanced to become one of the world's most noticeable critics of the government. Snowden is considered a hero and a patriot of the country, human rights movements like ACLU and Amnesty International advocate that Edward Snowden did great deeds to champion for the privacy rights of the citizens. (Greenwald, 2014) On the contrary, some people and the US intelligence consider Snowden a traitor to the state, the way he exposed the NSA was dubious and brought great risk to the international relationship between the US and other countries. Moreover, the state government accused him of breaching of information of the state.

The author describes this citizen as being an overall regular man in society, who did not change or impact the world by any means. He was a normal man who bought a paper every day

     “The Unknown Citizen” by W.H. Auden, is a commentary on government and the materialism of modern man. The poem is written in the form of an obituary inscribed on a monument built by the government in commemoration of an average, upstanding, and decent community member. Throughout the passage, the speaker lists facts about the citizen’s life which he believes prove that the deceased was a valuable person. In actuality these facts represent nothing more than the socially accepted values and actions instilled in society by materialistic views. This makes the government appear unconcerned with the true thoughts and feelings of its people, seeing them only as statistics. We can see this in the subtitle “To

Albert Camus creates a series of characters in The Stranger whose personality traits and motivations mirror those that are overlooked upon by the average man. Camus develops various characters and scenarios that show true humanity which tends to have been ignored due to the fact of how typical it has become. Camus incorporates abominable personality traits of the characters, variety, consistency, and everyone’s fate.

Art is the expression of human’s creative skill and imagination, art pass through society, and it reflects social life by shaping. Art, such as literature, dance, painting, calligraphy, and music. James Baldwin, a famous African- American author of “Stranger in the village.” He discussed the rank and relationship between the Blacks and Whites in the society. Also, Baldwin went to the village in Leukerbad, and lived with the White Europeans. This essay is about the the experience and history of him. Teju Cole was the one who had read the “Stranger in the village” and he wrote what he felt about James Baldwin’s essay. Their opinions were opposite, but I think there is no right or wrong.

In fact, there are many critics who believe that this poem was Auden’s own epitaph on Hitler- a personal ode to the man who had wielded such power in the years of his dictatorship and played no small role in shaping the world as we know it today and they had known it then.