“Digging,” by Seamus Heaney, is a poem narrated from a writer, whose family’s tradition is to work with the earth in ways that necessitate digging. He is proud of his father and grandfather for their skillfulness in their work. However, he tells us that he wishes instead to be a writer, which will break him away from the family tradition of working with the earth. [...]

In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin tells the story of two brothers and their challenges in life. Their challenges deeply intertwine, and yet they are very different. While the narrator’s challenge is to take responsibility for his brother, Sonny, Sonny’s challenge is, however, to be independent from his brother’s responsibility, or anybody else’s. The irony is that these two challenges counter each other. Sonny’s challenge is to become self-sufficient, while the narrator’s challenge is to help him become self-sufficient. It is funny, isn’t it, that to be independent, he must first accept help from another? [...]

Jacques-Louis David was born in Paris, on August 30, 1754, and died 77 years later in Brussels on December 30, 1825 (Roberts, 3). He was taught by Vein, one of the most known painters of the time (Friedlaender, 12). Many of his painting, including the two I have chosen, represent very emotional events that had happened during and around the time that he lived. David was able to capture these events on canvas and really bring out its pathos and emotion. [...]

One difficulty the world has always been faced with is crime. We have put penalties on crime, such as flogging and beating in the older days, and today we have more civilized methods such as jailing and the death sentence. But we still have crime. It would be ridiculous to think that we will ever fully get rid of crime in this imperfect world. Even so, we are still always striving to come up with new ways to lower the crime rate. One much disputed method to reduce crime is a gun ban – to ban all guns. Banning guns is a very dramatic thing to do and it deserves to be thought out. Something that seems to be neglected by a lot of anti-gun advocates is that criminals will still have the black market as a way to attain their guns even if they are banned, and for this reason I do not think a gun ban would turn out as expected. [...]

It is an unfortunate fact that even in our age of modern technological proficiency and crime-solving techniques, criminal activity is still rampant in America today. Much of this activity is rooted in gangs, including many murders, beatings and other violence. Furthermore, some gangs have significant financial resources available due to the entrepreneurial skills of various drug lords. This allows them to extend their violent acts at will, and surely makes it difficult for the police to contain them and impossible to stop the flow of new criminals trained by these informal organizations. [...]