History and Memory in Life is Beautiful

In Scott Ryan’s text History and Memory in Life is Beautiful he talks about the movie Life is Beautiful and how the protagonist, Guido, gives the movies a very fictional feel in a real setting. The world he tries to create for himself and his son, Joshua, is a very positive world; he views everything with a positive aspect. Even after Guido and his son got caught he still played it off to Joshua that everything will be fine and that the bus ride and the death camps were all apart of a game for his birthday. The reason for lying like that is to protect his own son so he doesn’t freak out. In a way, his text shows that you should relate to one another in always a positive way, although what Guido does may not be the best way to go through life. It is good to make the best situation possible out of a bad situation but sometimes, especially in the realities of the harsh camps, you need to realize reality and take things from there instead of pushing the bad to the side. I believe the text is straightforward about the values it proposes, considering in the second page of the text he says “the extreme barbarity or Nazism and Fascism acts as a backdrop to the narrative’s central premise that to see beauty in even the most heinous conditions is to triumph over evil.” I believe these values he talks about are very natural, because it is good to make good out of bad, but to deny to someone the realities of what’s going on is not always the best idea.

The New Colossus

In John Washington’s essay titled “The New Colossus: Exploring the Idea of Border,” he talks mainly about the US-Mexican border and the real troubles of the migrant workers that try to come across illegally into America for a better life and to find work. Washington can be seen as a very understanding person because he helped the illegal immigrants when it came to medical help, food supply, or even just listening to their stories. He was hearing their point of view, which gave him a completely different perspective about the US-Mexican border than most ordinary people already have about them. It can be determined from my point of view as the reader that Washington was looking and doing this for as a very informational journey while documenting his experience. He would help all of the migrants but at the same time he would watch them as border patrol came along and see them all scatter and hide for their lives while he would watch, as he said, almost like a game. Obviously it’s more than a game, and from his essay, John Washington came out of this whole experience very sympathetic for them. A value that is brought up in his paper is the value of freedom in our lives. As an American my whole life, I have been living under a free democracy, but for the migrant farmers, it’s our government who is trying to prevent them from living the same life style as that of Americans. It is a very sad situation that most of them are put in because all they are trying to do is provide money and food in low quantities for their families and maybe even themselves, but our government wont let it happen for reasons that are very understandable.