English Writing 1101 Class 3 Questions

Andrew McTigue                                                                                                                        Professor Young                                                                                                                             English Writing 1101                                                                                                                       9/7/16

Who should speak? The citizens of Friendswood? An esteemed institution? Why?

The citizens of Friendswood should speak about the health and economic effects of the chemical dumping at Banes Field, primarily due to the lack of restriction on location. There is hardly a procedure or guideline to prevent any citizen of Friendswood from searching for yet another “different artifact in the ruins,” (Steinke, 9). Steinke praises such an advantage in the discussions of local citizens the McHughs. “Lee remembered how the McHughs had tried to have a pool installed in their backyard, but they couldn’t make the excavation stable because the dirt contained so much oil, which also leaked up through the cracks in the cement of their driveway.” Nonetheless, the Environmental Protection Agency always “took a sample closer to the house, which was procedure, and the soil came up nearly clean,” (Steinke, 34). A lack of accurate testing also shows distinct parallels with the agency’s testing of an East Chicago, Illinois U.S.S. Lead testing plant in 2011. While the EPA concluded that “breathing the air, drinking tap water or playing in soil” would not be “expected to harm people’s health,” the Indiana State Department of Health revealed in July 2016 that twenty-nine children had elevated levels of lead in their blood in a nearby housing development. Hence, the citizens of Friendswood should use their absence of guidelines as a defense for free speech.

Another reason the citizens of Friendswood should translate the conditions at Banes Field into their own words is their experience with the area. Nearly every citizen seems to act as daily “unofficial guardian” to the aftermath whereas the Environmental Protection Agency has chosen to discard Banes as a successful project. Due to the fact that investigators Steinke describes the field as “charred with bright pink and brown stain,” and the air brings an audaciously overbearing mist of “empty commotion,” (Steinke, 9). Lee unfortunately appears to be the only individual who can visualize the aftermath. The text reveals that Lee is left to act as the therapist of Banes Field since the field stopped being a place of daily inspection “a year or two after” Rosemont became vacant for the contamination of nostalgia (Steinke, 4). The lack of experience and failure to communicate knowledge is not limited to the external conflict that Steinke creates for her fictional characters. From January 2005 to June 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig undertook 16 fewer Mineral Management Services than the minimum required amount, according to the Huffington Post. Within three years of each other, both Banes Field and the Gulf of Mexico became locations where the ignorance of authority traded solace with ruins. Hence, familiarity serves as another advantage for the citizens of Friendswood to challenge the fallacies of the federal government.

"The ugly field had seemed benign for so many years, fooling everyone with its open space and common weeds, its sorry-looking stooped trees." -Rene Steinke

When is it okay to dissent?

Dissent should be spoken only if the speaker is able to prove his opinion is stronger than the common belief. Rene Steinke identifies such a hard truth in her 2014 novel Friendswood. The protagonist, Lee Knowles, has used dirt-filled “empty, sterilized jelly jars” to represent the health hazards at Banes Field. However, her argument for environmental reform that she has voiced has repeatedly been silenced under the “two one-thousand-page binders of evidence from federal agencies, clearing Banes Field for human health,” (Steinke, 34). The fact that she could not capture a picture of the chemicals at Banes with “anything around it to put to scale” cancelled any redemption that Lee could have done for her daughter (Steinke, 29).  Once again, the characters' primary conflict creates its own parallels with the struggles of the world of the audience. In a 2016 interview with Buzzfeed, an anonymous woman claimed how she knew Judge Persky’s reduction of Brock Allen Turner’s sentence of six months for sexual assault would produce a determination to “speak even louder,” particularly due to Turner’s defense of promiscuity. “By definition rape is the absence of promiscuity, rape is the absence of consent, and it perturbs me deeply that he can’t even see that distinction.” The New York Times proved the anonymous woman’s theory correcting, reporting shortly after the sentencing of the creation of a recall challenge to Persky’s ruling. Thus, those who disagree must present evidence that the igniter's argument holds against objection.