SWA # 3

Ibrahim Elsayed Rasheed      

English 102-111

January 22, 2012

SWA#3

In his article “What Will the Future Generations Condemn Us For,” Kwame Appiah discusses some issues that he thinks future generations would not like about us. At first, he does remind and show us some of the activities that were acceptable in the past couple of generations and became very unacceptable in this generation. He does that by saying and mentioning some examples such as slavery being accepted by the majority of the society, women’s not being allowed to vote, and husbands’ having an excessive power over their families.  Then, he does lay down some signs that determine whether a practice is going to be a black point on this generation or not, and he does use pathos and logos arguments. He says that people, who thought slavery was acceptable and not oppressive because their parents and grandparents had slaves, had a lack in the logical part of their argument. He also says that people who eat the sugar this grown by the slaves should have a little emotion and think about those who grew that sugar.

One of the things that Appiah thinks we are doing and the next generations will blame us for it is “Our Prison System.” He does use some statistics to support his argument (ethos). He says that one quarter of the world’s prisoners is in America. In the local side, he says that one of every one hundred adults in the US is in one of its prisons. Then, he does turn our attention to the emotional part using both pathos and ethos. Appiah says that around 100,000 prisons have been sexually abused and they might get HIV because of that.

The picture I chose to discuss is figure 1.7 in page 9. The artist does reject and disagree with the idea of paying fees for bags at the airports in a funny way. Through his painting, the artist says we should put on all of our clothes to avoid paying so much money to have it transported especially if the entire family members are going to travel together. He also says that we should not take so many clothes and only take what could fit in a carry-on bag to avoid the baggage fees.