We’re the Americans. We’re the bourgeoise. The well-to-do. We’ve got groceries, internet, toilets that flush. We’ve got highways, power lines, sewers. We’ve got iphones, Netflix, video games. We’ve got clean water big houses, backyards, parks, expensive private schools, fancy restaurants, and laptops and Spotify and Wikipedia and trains and subways and buses and ice cream, we’re the envy of the world, we’re the masters of the universe, we have everything we could’ve ever wanted three hundred years ago, we beat evolution, we beat life, we won, and the only caveat in our paradise is that now that we have everything we have to make up problems to keep living, we have to manufacture our desires and motivations, we care so that we can keep caring, and to forget that we’re all just pretending, is deadly.
I really enjoyed "Were the Americans" it had a great choice of words In it, and you are completely right all we do is fight even though we have everything we could possibly ever want!
ReplyDeleteThis is really good Elias! I like the different approach you took to writing this. The run-on sentences give it a more urgent feeling and help to portray the concerns about American society. I also like how you finished with "is deadly," it was a very dramatic and emphasized ending.
ReplyDeleteElias, I like this vignette because it puts the average Americans life into perspective compared to the rest of the world and our ancestors. I thought this line was significant, "we have everything we have to make up problems to keep living, we have to manufacture our desires and motivations, we care so that we can keep caring, and to forget that we’re all just pretending, is deadly," because it demonstrates the materialism of American life. In the past, people's problems focused around survival and now that we "have everything we could've ever wanted three hundred years ago" we "make up problems to keep living."
ReplyDeleteI love your realistic view of American life in this eloquently written vignette.
Good job Elias!
I admire how your vignette provides an unconventional perspective of life. Because I share the same home as the the narrator of the vignette, I can directly relate to it and understand this new perspective.
ReplyDeleteThis vignette, unlike many others, is not just a story from your life, and I love that. This portrays your opinion and the truth about our society. Your perspective on Americans is quite interesting, and what you wrote is quite powerful. Well done!
ReplyDeleteI really like how wide this piece expands our field of view. It encompasses both how fortunate we are and how unfortunate we are, creating the very instruments of our destruction while at the same time hailing it as progress.
ReplyDeleteYour vignette is very powerful due to how it shows your perspective on our (very spoiled) society. I really like this line, "we're the envy of the world," because it really shows how America can be very self-centered at times.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very deep poem. It talks about how Americans in general have so many things, most of them just useless entertainment options, and yet we can't live without them. I like how it talks about how we have come so far in our short 300 year history, and we have so many things that help us, and we live in a kind of paradise, but it's all just pretending.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very deep poem. It talks about how Americans in general have so many things, most of them just useless entertainment options, and yet we can't live without them. I like how it talks about how we have come so far in our short 300 year history, and we have so many things that help us, and we live in a kind of paradise, but it's all just pretending.
ReplyDelete