Rhetorical Proposal: Poverty & Human Rights

Stakeholder: Opponents to the Occupy Movement

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2013/09/17/occupy-wall-street-two-years-later-radicalism-is-the-new-normal/

            This article is attempting to articulate that the Occupy movement was too radical.  It begins by giving a bit of a background, and then quickly switches to a more dire tone, conveying the eerie message that “Occupy Wall Street is both invisible and omnipresent”, meaning that the real force behind the movement hasn’t gone away. The author believes this is a serious issue, even going as far as to say that the “movement promoted anti-American, anti-Western, anti-capitalist revolutionary domestic change”, an extremely bold statement appealing to the pathos of conservative America.  The real crux of the article is its constant references to Obama and his sympathies with the “ideals and tactics of the extreme left”. This is another element of emotional appeal, there is nothing that modern American conservatives love to hate more than the president, and all that is required to paint a movement as negative is to show that he has sympathies for it.

The author even brings up a comparison to the Arab Spring, and mentions that it promoted “jihadist islam”. I found this assertion to be extremely interesting not only because I disagree that the Arab Spring promoted such a thing, but also because it honestly seems like it’s thrown in the middle of the article just to make a reference to Islam, another play on the fears of right wingers. I just completely disagree with everything this article to attempting to convey. Not only is it poorly written and shows a complete lack of regard for the political facts of the US at the time, the real topic of the article, that Occupy was a radical movement, is something I see as completely false. This author seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is he is condemning, and if he thinks that people asking for a higher minimum wage is an example of “anti-Capitalist revolutionary domestic change”, then he has a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be poor as well.

Introduction

My name is Collin Falloway, and I'm a biology major with an emphasis on pre-medicine at the University of Kentucky. My schedule this semester is bloated with the sciences and mathematics such as calculus, biology, and chemistry, which is unfortunate because I happen to be extraordinarily bad at anything involving numbers. Interestingly enough, the humanities are really what I'm most passionate about and I've been trying to do everything I can to keep a well rounded liberal arts education in line with the banality of a science one.

In the previous class we showed our articles we had collected to the other students in an attempt to show the variety of issues of the day. We were asked to find two of them, the one that I chose was an article on the the refugee crisis in Europe, which made the argument that the refugee issues may become such a predicament that it may very well cause wealthy and powerful western nations to invade (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/middleeast/europe-refugee-crisis-syria-civil-war.html?_r=0).  The other was a short article about John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, who was expressing his admiration for the negotiators who effectively freed ten american military personnel who were seized by Iran (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/middleeast/europe-refugee-crisis-syria-civil-war.html?_r=0). The reason that I chose the article about the Iran hostages was because it was a current event, but I chose the article about the refugee crisis because I see the crisis itself as a really interesting and compelling insight into the psyche of western culture and values.

Over the past few months, I've become increasingly aware of this crisis, and I'm always left wondering what the west is going to do next. I see it as a test of our principles, really, because I think in the end we will know if western nations really are concerned with sharing their liberties with more disenfranchised peoples like the mantra that is so often espoused says, or if we keep our borders closed to those less fortunate in the name of security and purity. Other topics that I find interesting are anything which deals with the polarization of the American political system, or anything that deals with civil rights and police brutality.