John Manfredonia's RCL Blog Just another weblog

This I believe 2

Whenever I’m facing a tough situation I always make sure to never give up. Even if I end up failing, the passion to never give up will allow me to pick myself up and try again, or keep practicing until I get it right. But many people become lazy and just give up whenever they face a tough situation. I used to be like this until I finally learned my lesson through high school wrestling. It was my freshman year and I decided I wanted to try out wrestling since I wasn’t part of any other sports team. The first couple weeks of practice were really tough for me. All of the intense cardio and live wrestling was really making me frustrated. But luckily I had a coach who always managed to inspire me. During one practice he noticed that everyone was being lethargic during drilling and instead of yelling at us he made us all sit down and read a long story about a wrestler who lost his legs and instead of giving up he continued wrestling and became a state champion. After being surprised by the story everyone on the team felt the motivation to give it their all for the rest of practice. After this I continued to give it my all for every practice. All of the practices were worth it for me. There were countless matches where I was behind in points but I managed to not give up and ended up winning instead.  I even ended up being captain of the team my senior year because I never gave up.  I was able to translate my strategy of not giving up to other things such as my education and surprised my family by getting accepted to Penn State. I do believe that anyone can do whatever he or she wants by not giving up. It might take some inspiration like my situation but there is a way for everyone. I believe in not giving up.

I really do believe that the environment is an issue that is not focused on enough, especially in politics. Every decision the government makes won’t matter if we can’t survive on Earth in the future because we treated the environment so poorly.

The issue of fracking often comes up in debates. People should worry about the long-term affects, it would be selfish not to. With gas prices so high and oil making so much controversy in the middle-east, I do believe that we should focus strongly on alternative energy sources. Our main goal should be to set up a plan to replace fossil fuels as an energy source. As most people know, we do not have an unlimited source of fossil fuels. So eventually we are going to need a new source anyway, so why not start now before the problem gets out of hand.

Rhetoric plays an important part in ways of helping the environment. To be convincing you need to be able to appeal to certain audiences and choose the right words to make yourself seem more convincing. There many ways of rhetoric that I can discuss that people use when talking about the environment.