Focusing on content rather than the underlying ideas is equivalent to merely scratching the surface of a problem. If approached this way, either Our Secret is about all the things mentioned above and a dozen more, or Griffin decided to ramble pointlessly for fifty pages. However, if we do not settle for an easy answer, we will find that everything that Griffin says boils down to a common theme. Griffin’s Our Secret is about free will.

In the times of World War II my grandfather was a little kid, just a few years old. He had several siblings, I cannot even remember how many, and he was the youngest one. When the threat of death to the family became real, most of the adults and children left. They decided that my grandfather was too young to survive the trip. He was left with friends of the family, who refused to go. When the Red Army came, they were looking for Germans. What is today Poland’s territory, back then belonged to Germany, and he could barely speak Polish. He was basically a German. Even his name was Horst. When the soldiers came to the house, the whole family – according to what I have been told – tried to be as un-German as possible. To this day no one can explain to me what that actually means, though my suspicion is that women just tried to look pretty, and men did their best not to drink any beer. Everything was going fine until everyone stopped in his or her tracks when my grandfather asked for food in the only language he could speak fairly fluently. Fortunately, the soldiers either missed it or ignored it on purpose. He was one of the lucky ones to survive the war. Later in his life, Horst started using his second name, Robert. Being German in any way in Poland is yet to become fashionable.

Over sixty years later, in 2007, the “family” was reunited. My grandfather tracked down his siblings, most of whom were still alive, and we traveled to Stolpen, Germany to meet our long lost relatives. Neither of the parties knew the other’s language, so we had to communicate through an interpreter. Everyone tried his or her best to find a common ground but with little success. Though we shared the same blood, we were simply too different from one another. Not antagonistic or suspicious, just different. Our lives have been drastically different, and thus we could not connect on an emotional level. We had a talk over a cup of coffee, but no one shed any tears.  

The striking, insurmountable barrier between my grandfather and his brothers and sisters is an example of what Griffin says about free will. We do like to believe that who we are is up to us. However, we are, to a great extent, a product of the world we live in. We do not get to choose where and when we are born, what we look like or what our race is. Fundamental decisions about who we are made for us. Not coincidentally, some of them are made by our parents.    

Griffin writes about Heinrich Himmler’s childhood, “The earliest entries in this diary betray so little. Like the words of a schoolboy commanded to write what the teacher requires of him, they are wooden and stiff. The stamp of his father’s character is so heavy on this language that I catch not even a breath of self here. It is easy to see how this would be true. One simply has to imagine Gebhard standing behind Heinrich and tapping his foot” (302).

Though this example of a parent’s influence is undoubtedly radical, it is also straightforward. Some parts of his behavior, worldview and personality were as if chiseled in the stone by his father. Young Heinrich did not even get a chance to protest or rebel. That is why we should give up the illusion that we control everything that happens to us

Focusing on content rather than the underlying ideas is equivalent to merely scratching the surface of a problem. If approached this way, either Our Secret is about all the things mentioned above and a dozen more, or Griffin decided to ramble pointlessly for fifty pages. However, if we do not settle for an easy answer, we will find that everything that Griffin says boils down to a common theme. Griffin’s Our Secret is about free will.

In the times of World War II my grandfather was a little kid, just a few years old. He had several siblings, I cannot even remember how many, and he was the youngest one. When the threat of death to the family became real, most of the adults and children left. They decided that my grandfather was too young to survive the trip. He was left with friends of the family, who refused to go. When the Red Army came, they were looking for Germans. What is today Poland’s territory, back then belonged to Germany, and he could barely speak Polish. He was basically a German. Even his name was Horst. When the soldiers came to the house, the whole family – according to what I have been told – tried to be as un-German as possible. To this day no one can explain to me what that actually means, though my suspicion is that women just tried to look pretty, and men did their best not to drink any beer. Everything was going fine until everyone stopped in his or her tracks when my grandfather asked for food in the only language he could speak fairly fluently. Fortunately, the soldiers either missed it or ignored it on purpose. He was one of the lucky ones to survive the war. Later in his life, Horst started using his second name, Robert. Being German in any way in Poland is yet to become fashionable. 

Over sixty years later, in 2007, the “family” was reunited. My grandfather tracked down his siblings, most of whom were still alive, and we traveled to Stolpen, Germany to meet our long lost relatives. Neither of the parties knew the other’s language, so we had to communicate through an interpreter. Everyone tried his or her best to find a common ground but with little success. Though we shared the same blood, we were simply too different from one another. Not antagonistic or suspicious, just different. Our lives have been drastically different, and thus we could not connect on an emotional level. We had a talk over a cup of coffee, but no one shed any tears.   

The striking, insurmountable barrier between my grandfather and his brothers and sisters is an example of what Griffin says about free will. We do like to believe that who we are is up to us. However, we are, to a great extent, a product of the world we live in. We do not get to choose where and when we are born, what we look like or what our race is. Fundamental decisions about who we are made for us. Not coincidentally, some of them are made by our parents.    

Griffin writes about Heinrich Himmler’s childhood, “The earliest entries in this diary betray so little. Like the words of a schoolboy commanded to write what the teacher requires of him, they are wooden and stiff. The stamp of his father’s character is so heavy on this language that I catch not even a breath of self here. It is easy to see how this would be true. One simply has to imagine Gebhard standing behind Heinrich and tapping his foot” (302).

Though this example of a parent’s influence is undoubtedly radical, it is also straightforward. Some parts of his behavior, worldview and personality were as if chiseled in the stone by his father. Young Heinrich did not even get a chance to protest or rebel. That is why we should give up the illusion that we control everything that happens to us

Everything would be white. Some would call it a winter wonderland. The trees and roads would all be covered with a few inches of snow. The lake would be ready to skate on. Best of all, it would be a snow day. Everyone at Lunenburg High School would stay in and get a chance to harness some much needed sleep. Chelsea would get up late and sit on the couch and watch the 25 Days of Christmas with her sisters. It would be a time to kick back and to catch up on some studying before midterms. It would be a relaxing day; there would be nothing to worry about.

For the remainder of the day Chelsea was lazy, trying to recover from the brutal track practice she was put through the day before. She remained sedentary on the couch reviewing for her junior year Physics midterm and listening to her brothers outside fighting with each other and throwing snowballs around.
December 11, 2008
    After yet another day of classes, she crawled into bed hoping there would be no school in the morning. Soon she drifted off, but was awoken by the sound of thunder and flashes of lightning and it became hard to seep.

December 12, 2008
    She kept looking at her phone periodically in the morning in hopes for the familiar school closing text alert from the weather channel to appear. It finally came just before six:

Snow Day Alert: Lunenburg Schools cancelled

Yesss. She felt relieved and fell back asleep.

It wasn’t long before Johanna came into her room followed by her energetic golden retriever (both of whom have no sense of personal space) and jumped onto her bed to wake her. Jo was excited to have no school again. Even though this nine year old was in love with school, she was glad about missing her homework. She told Chelsea that the power was out and that she had to get up and look outside.

Chelsea does not like the snow very much and is not a winter person to say the least. She belongs on the beach down in Miami or anywhere far away from the cold weather. However, one of her favorite things to do it to go outside and look at the fresh snow right after a storm. She loves how clean, fresh and at peace everything looks, but this only lasts a few hours. As the day moves on, it become tracked with mud and the  picturesque moment is gone.

Taking the risk. Being in Introduction to Writing is what taking risks is all about.  It is not always about having the most politically correct essay with the least amount of errors, but at times it is being able to do something that no one has done, being creative and being you. Allowing you to be expressed through writing. Kwame Anthony Appiah states in his text entitled “The Ethics of Individuality” that “authenticity: it is a matter of being true to who you already really are, or would be if it weren’t for distorting influences” (Appiah 69). Appiah argues much like how we learned in class is about taking risk and chances. Not being afraid to go the extra limit or even be the different one or the over achiever. If you have ideas that you want to put down on a piece of paper do not be afraid of what your peers or colleagues may think of you. I remember our class’s first writing assignment with the difficult Appiah reading assignment. We were asked to write and respond to what we thought Appiah meant in his essay. As for me, I took a completely different route and wrote my paper in a first person narrative. It was a narrative of responsibility to separate oneself from parents and friends. The essay that I wrote was so far different from every other student in the class that it stood out. I can exactly recall being afraid of writing this narrative because I did not know if the teacher was going to like my style of writing or simply be upset with the fact that I didn’t exactly follow the framework of the essay, but I took the risk regardless. In the end the risk paid off. I was rewarded with the best grade that I have received on the projects yet. “Individuality is the same thing with development, and that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces or can produce, well developed human beings, I might here close the argument” (Appiah 59). Developing as a writer is what is important. Learning from your mistakes, whether they are sentence levels, grammar, punctuation, or etc, is what makes you a better writer. It is not okay to be stagnant. As a college writer it is your duty to learn from your mistakes so that you can go above and beyond for your future papers.

Pokémon was a media phenomenon in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. This Japanese program aired all over Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America. I find it interesting that the program was as successful outside of Asia as it was, because children growing up with Western values had to understand and accept Eastern cultural values in order to fully absorb the lessons of the Pokémon trainer. Nice point In Europe and America, for example, where the emphasis is on the individual and not on the group, children willingly bought into the super-importance of the group. There are many elements of Japanese culture that dominate the show, such as not losing is more important than winning, and that it is better to play well and lose than to win by cheating or deception. These values are different from Western values where emphasis is traditionally placed on winning at all costs. (Bernard Madoff perpetuated his massive Ponzi scheme until he suspected that he was about to be caught and not because his conscience told him he was stealing people’s life savings.) By watching Pokémon over and over, my friends and I absorbed its values that were reinforced through our role play when we were away from the television set. Just as the panopticon of a rehab facility modifies behavior through peer example, repetition and rules, the Pokémon panopticon used the trading card game and toys to strengthen the personal identification viewers had with the television program. Each episode began with the same greeting: “Welcome to the world of Pokémon, a special place where people just like you train to become the number one, Pokémon Master in the world!” Being part of the Pokémon world provided us an identity and security that was more exciting than what we obtained from our families.

My friends and I demanded to be part of the collective Pokémon family. We allowed a television program to monopolize our television viewing, to control us and become consumers of everything Pokémon. Similar to the effect of Foucault’s panopticon, all of us Pokémon trainers became prisoners of the panopticon of a television show. The choices we made were based on a set of rules established by the program, and we behaved accordingly whether we were watching the program, playing the card game or role playing at recess. I remember wanting to be one of the children who owned a Pokémon so that I too might teach and control it. My friends and I were able to make this fantasy a reality by playing the trading card game. Some children simply traded the cards so as to obtain a complete set of all two hundred Pokémon. Others bought trading card packs simply for the holographic cards, but I played with my friends doing battle with the cards, promoting our Pokémon to more advanced levels according to the rules of Pokémon training. Whether fully dedicated to the Pokémon cause or a novice player, we were transformed by the television show into advocates and consumers. We fed off each other’s enthusiasm for Pokémon products, and we wanted more. The Pokémon panopticon encouraged us to keep buying until our collections were complete, but the number of products kept increasing so we were never done. Amazing if our parents complained about buying too many packs of cards, we convinced friends to get their parents to buy card packs so that we might improve our chances of trading for the card that would complete our collection. Some retailers sold cards individually at hefty premiums thereby capitalizing on our buying frenzy.

I never confused this role-playing fantasy with reality, but my behavior did change for the better. My mother no longer had to drag me out of bed to be in time for school. I was up and dressed in my khaki pants, button down shirt and tie with blazer before seven AM so that I might watch the latest Pokémon episode while eating breakfast. The television program was a powerful force of action. I had to be up to date with all the happenings in the Pokémon universe, and I could only do so if I were ready for school. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes that the aim of the panopticon “is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply”(221). Contrary to the belief that watching television makes children passive, Pokémon, the television show, inspired me to action. Its power drove me to take care of my responsibility to be ready for school, and then pushed me to focus solely on the Pokémon game in my free time. To use Foucault’s language, I was being trained to be productive. In this case, productive meant buying more trading cards and theme merchandise and watching further episodes of Pokémon. Foucault writes, “the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital” (231). Pokémon operated precisely as a panopticon, because it gathered us, turned us into consumers of its products, and generated over half a billion dollars in trading card and toy sales in 2000.