2nd Blog Post

I thought the readings we had through this second month were very interesting while integrating food and culture to an understanding that I could relate to.

In this second blog post, I’m going to elaborate on the reading we had last week from Rhetoric as Symbolic Action by Catherine Palczewski, Richard Ice, and John Fritch. It was a moderate length chapter from a text focusing on civic life and incorporating rhetoric within. A lot of the concepts mentioned were foreign to me, though I have been finding the idea of culture and rhetoric more fascinating the more I read. I was tied into last week’s readings from the first two articles that brought the idea of food and culture together, describing how the two build off of each other. After reading about Julia Child and Michael Pollan, one of my favorite authors, I had good impressions while starting Rhetoric as Symbolic Action.

I started the chapter, and enjoyed it. It was long and I had to keep notes to fully follow the structure of the content, though there was a paragraph on page 20 that struck me. I was in awe, honestly, after reading it. The paragraph was concluding the section regarding civic engagement, a concept of the “people’s participation in individual or collective action to develop solutions to social, economic, and political challenges in their communities, states, nations, and world.”

The current idea of civic engagement in the United States has been under fire, the medium in which seems to be the only known way to gain attention towards serious issues many political leaders are choosing to disregard or inconsiderately make changes to. People have opinions on marches and the purpose of them, though at the end of the day, they are allowed under our constitution and should be encouraged. I don’t like talking about politics. They get messy and though we may not agree with our peers, we must learn to respect each other. The least we could do is learn how our views are effecting others, how the choices we make are shaping the lives of others. It would seem selfish not to.

Though, the concluding paragraph on page 20, summed up my thoughts exactly on the idea of public speech but in a more organized, cohesive, and scholarly manner.

“Open communication is not to be feared. Ideas with which you disagree not be avoided or suppressed. Instead, all people should develop the critical faculties that enable them to judge which ideas in the marketplace they should ‘buy’, which expressions are worthy of assent, and which ideas should define their characters. People need the right to express their opinions, but also the skills and knowledge with which to do so, as well as a government and society willing to consider and respond to those opinions.”

The need for outside sources for this blog post seems odd, for examples on this topic can be found through every headline. Though I did find an article by John Parisella, “The Importance of Civic Engagement” that talked about civic engagement and the role young people will play with it. He talked about how young people today, even though are so attached to media, will have a quieter role in civic engagement. Civic engagement and freedom of speech is something we have been arguing since civilizations first formed. It was perhaps when we began developing as a species, when we configured the first meal. (Another topic I really enjoyed reading about)

Parisella mentioned also the key to civic engagement and how it “starts with a sense of commitment to improve the lives of others”.

http://www.americasquarterly.org/importance-civic-engagement