Monday, April 11, 2011

Event Blog

The reading for this week was the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer. From the beginning this appeared to be a normal novel with all the elements and a lesson that the reader will typically learn. But after getting into the first half of the novel there appeared to be something special about this novel. It contained themes and lessons that are applicable in daily life and they were important lessons for a person to learn. When I looked at the cover previous to opening the book my assumptions were that it was about a outlaw/cowboy that does what he wishes and is constantly getting in trouble. He seemed like a man that would have little regard for the people around him. This is a story about a cowboy who wonders through a small town and eventually finds himself at a farmer's land. He appears to just be moving through but eventually stays for an extended period of time. During that time he built a relationship with the Staretts. Him and Joe become good friends and build a family like employer-employee relationship. Joe Starett faces problems with Fletcher a powerful cattle boss who want to clear everyone, including Joe and his family, off the land. He sends people to intimidate, threaten and harm the workers of Joe, in order to get him out of town. They attempt to harm, intimidate Shane but fail to do so. The only thing the accomplish is getting a broken arm and begin scared away. The relationship between Shane and the family builds but at a point the family questions whether it was a mistake or not to hire Shane and get him mixed up the trouble. The event that I attended this week was the Sexual Violence Awareness t-shirt. I wore the t-shirt for Take Back the Night, that had the statistic “1 in 8” on it. Before even reading the novel this t-shirt really opened my eyes to the amount of college students saying they were once sexually violated in their life. It is shocking to here that, especially males. I have heard the 1 in 4 statistic for females before but never the male. This event corresponds to the reading for this week in many ways. The first way is in a general lesson that many people have heard before, don't judge a book by its cover. In Shane, if I were to assume the book was about what the cover looked like, I would have gotten the wrong image. Walking around campus on a normal day it seems that everyone on campus is normal, a normal college student just living a normal life. But everyone has secrets or something people do not know about them. This was evident in today's event. You can not just judge a person and make assumptions. You can not just say that person is mentally, emotionally and physically fine and has never experienced something terrible. After today I realize that people may have experienced something that others have not. A person can not just judge a persons life by looking at them. Another correlating theme that can connect the reading to the event is people not really knowing other people. When I say that I mean, people may think they know another persons life and everything but they actually don't. Although I am not a statistic and have never been sexually violated, many people were unaware of why I was wearing this shirt today. This just made me see how people you may know, do not know everything about a person, as seen in Shane when the family does not know about his life or himself until he lives with them.

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