In the braindead Megaphone by George Saunders he effectively analyzes the use of social and mass media in order to prove how miss used they are in today's world. Saunders uses the idea of a braindead megaphone, or a megaphone that cannot choose between what is good for society and just trash, to emphasize the impact that it has on us as a group of people. Saunders's example of this "braindead megaphone" is that it will project the message of whoever speaks into it, whether that person is right or wrong. He digs up many problems in the idea that if people were allowed to speak into this megaphone that the wrong message is portrayed by whoever speaks the "loudest". His theory proves that whoever yells or speaks the loudest in a room immediately attracts the attention of his peers, and that the brain dead megaphone is only making their message "louder" by attracting more people. The megaphone could have been a useful and good tool as he explains in various points, it just depends on the person or the message using it. The social media storm seems to neglect this idea and that the good messages have seemed to have been drowned out by all the drama, or the useless attention grabbing nominal "yelling" into our society, making this tool for what could be great intelligence, just another distraction in our day to day life.
While searching for articles about faith I came across this tragic story. When I read the headline I knew I had to read about it. This article is perfect for the faith unit because it talks about a baby boy born blind. The baby boy, Christian, is born with an extremely rare condition called tessier cleft, which means that he was unable to fully close his mouth, and that his eyes are also clefted which means that they never even formed. While Christian's internal organs were completely normal, he was born without eyes, and underwent surgery on his cleft palate when he was just four days old, spending four weeks recovering. It took the hospital two months just to give his rare condition a name. The team of doctors and the couple discovered that only about 50 other people in the world had the same diagnosis of Tessier cleft. This terribly unfortunate disease has made the parents of Christian more involved with their son, and continue to cherish him with everlasting love. Bad things always happen to people and they blame it on their luck or karma. Some people believe in faith and that everything happens because of God giving us the punishment of sinning. In the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Harold Kushner talks about all of the different terrible things that happened during his many interviews with people and how they affected the rest of their lives. He tells us to follow our path and not disconnect from God. He says to be independent and learn from Gods rulings so we can make ourselves better people. The challenges we are given will strengthen us to be stronger and forgivable to all bad things in life. This article deals with a difficult situation of a mother and a father taking care of a very ill boy. Faith is brought to this family in believing in God, and that he will help them get through the tough obstacles that they are dealt with. The boy was born with a very ruthless disease which really questions me why does he or anybody have to be born with it? Why couldn’t he be born healthy and normal like most other children? The parents are probably dealing with many questions towards their own faith and really wonder why it had to be them. It has been a great representation of how these parents trying to live happily with their ill son and be happy about what they have. Therefore we should all be grateful for what we have and not whine about things that we don’t have. Everything happens for a reason and we all want to make excuses for Gods way, but we also need to think and learn about our bad situations and gain wisdom from them. Faith is something to believe in and not blame on in bad times.
