SYNTHESIS ESSAY (AP LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION ESSAY
Directions: The following prompt is based on the accompanying six sources. This question requires you to integrate a variety of sources into a coherent, well-written essay. Refer to the sources to support your position; avoid mere paraphrase or summary. Your argument should be central; the sources should support this argument. Remember to attribute both direct and indirect citations.
Introduction Protest has been an integral part of our nations fabric. It is an expression or declaration of objection, disapproval or dissent often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid. We have seen it play out during the Vietnam war, through the civil rights movement, around the black lives matter movement, as a reaction to mass shootings and gun control, through the women’s march, against the 1% at occupy wall street, as a reaction to the 2016 election and each and every day in this country a small, grassroots protest can be found. We have also seen protest overthrow dictators throughout the global community over the past twenty years. Unaddressed protests may grow and widen into civil resistance, dissent, activism, riots, insurgency, revolts, and political and/or social revolution. But, is protest directly linked to this concept of ownership? Is protest, as Sadia Mohammed says, about owning our own humanity? Is it about taking ownership of the human and intangible right to exist in a safe and peaceful environment that provides room for autonomy, diversity, noise, disagreement and most of all breath?[unique_solution]
Assignment Read the following sources (including the introductory information and Mohammed’s argument on protest and ownership) carefully. Then, in an essay that synthesizes at least three of the sources for support, take a position that defends, challenges, or qualifies the claim that protest is about taking ownership of our own humanity. Refer to the sources as Source A, Source B, etc.; titles are included for your convenience.
Source A
Source B
Source C
On Protest an excerpt from Sadia Mohammed’s Hot Planet
Protesting is about taking ownership. It is about owning our own humanity and fighting for the right to exist in a just and equitable state. It is about taking ownership to the extent that we are fighting both against injustice and for a cause that is larger than us and our individual freedoms or desires. It is about taking ownership to the extent that we are willing to rebel from false narratives, from the deceit and duplicity of politicians as well as anyone else working to unleash an agenda, a set of punishable rules or an inequitable set of protocols we weren’t in agreement with or privy to. It is about taking ownership to the extent that we are willing to require accountability on the abuse of power even if it means that power may be unleashed on us. It is about taking ownership to the extent that an atmosphere of truth is created, an atmosphere where corruption and the rogues, scoundrels and tyrants – the princes and princesses reveling in their abuse of power – are suffocated by the rebellion, the accountability and the truth. Suffocated to the point of change. Now, all this being said, the reason protest faulters in the eyes of the watchers isn’t because protest itself is the culprit it’s because the system protest has been put in place to hold accountable has used its vast and unreachable power – its institutions, its media, its justice, its paperwork, its militia, its medicine, its podium leaders and its capitalism – to remove the concept of ownership from its masses, to turn ownership into the keeper of materialism – void of spirit, philosophy and the abstract nature of our human existence. Without a true understanding of what it actually means to take ownership of something human, something intangible – to take ownership of self, to take ownership of action, to take ownership of justice and community – protest will never be successful because its success stands on a groups ability to demand their human and intangible right to exist in a safe and peaceful environment that provides room for autonomy, diversity, noise, disagreement and most of all breath.
Source A: HONG KONG (NYTimes 2019)
As we know the protests began in June over plans – later put on ice, and finally withdrawn in September – that would have allowed extradition (the handing over of) criminals from Hong Kong to mainland China. But they’ve now spread to reflect wider demands for democratic reform, and an inquiry into alleged police brutality.
This is not all happening in a vacuum. There’s a lot of important context – some of it stretching back decades – that helps explain what is going on and allows us to see why ownership is such an important concept to the people involved in these protests. .
HISTORY:
It’s important to remember that Hong Kong is significantly different from other Chinese cities. To understand this, you need to look at its history. It was a British colony for more than 150 years – part of it, Hong Kong island, was ceded to the UK after a war in 1842. Later, China also leased the rest of Hong Kong – the New Territories – to the British for 99 years.
It became a busy trading port, and its economy took off in the 1950s as it became a manufacturing hub. The territory was also popular with migrants and dissidents fleeing instability, poverty or persecution in mainland China. Then, in the early 1980s, as the deadline for the 99-year-lease approached, Britain and China began talks on the future of Hong Kong – with the communist government in China arguing that all of Hong Kong should be returned to Chinese rule.
The two sides reached a deal in 1984 that would see Hong Kong return to China in 1997, under the principle of “one country, two systems”. This meant that while becoming part of one country with China, Hong Kong would enjoy “a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs” for 50 years. As a result, Hong Kong has its own legal system and borders, and rights including freedom of assembly and free speech are protected. For example, it is one of the few places in Chinese territory where people can commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, where the military opened fire on unarmed protesters in Beijing.
SOURCE B: IRAQ (Al Jazeera 2019)
Young men crowding onto an unfinished building that overlooks Tahrir Square, site of mass protests in Baghdad. Credit…Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The protests in Iraq – according to one of the protestors: “Let us be frank, we are poor people in Sadr City and we need many things: schools, health clinics, jobs,” said Mr. al-Kaabi, who drives a taxi to support his family. “What is a pity is that we believed the politicians who said, ‘vote for us and we will do our best for you,’” he said. “But then we found they were liars and so now we are saying, ‘enough.’”
For the last five weeks, more than 200,000 Iraqis across the country have gathered on any given day to demonstrate against the government. Security forces have killed at least 320 and wounded about 15,000, according to the United Nations office in Iraq. The protesters are angry about corruption, unemployment and Iran’s influence. Many are educated, idealistic young people, who are mostly urban and secular. But the largest group are working-class and poor Shiite Muslims, either from the southern part of the country or with origins there.
“This is a revolution of the poor, of the disappointed,” Abu Tiba said. The first settlers in Sadr City, mostly poor farmers and fishermen, came more than 60 years ago to escape the punishing feudal system run by wealthy sheikhs who cared little for those who worked their fields and harvested their date trees. Revolt and resistance was part of their identity. Their grandfathers in the south resisted British efforts to colonize Iraq in 1920. They lost that battle but not their suspiciousness of outsiders.
Most Sadr City residents, like many people in southern Iraq, are followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a nationalist and populist Shiite cleric and leader whose family long resisted the authority of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
The dictator assassinated Mr. al-Sadr’s father and brothers, and tortured to death other family members. Those loyal to the Sadr family suffered as well.
There was forced conscription during the Iran-Iraq war, from 1980 to 1988. “Almost every family was touched by this,” said Mr. Abbas, the Sadr City poet.
There was routine targeting of anyone trying to pray in public, which Saddam Hussein saw as an effort to rally the Shiites against the ruling Sunnis, said Sheikh Jalil al-Sarkhi, 70, a cleric and Sadr City native, who leads a modest mosque there.
“I could be arrested just for carrying a prayer rug,” he said.
Those decades of resistance prepared Sadr City for its fight against the Americans.
Mr. al-Sadr wanted the United States military out of Iraq. When the Americans came and tried to subdue his militias, United States soldiers were relentlessly attacked.
Roadside bombs targeted Humvees, and booby traps littered the neighborhood. Children were used as lookouts.
Sadr City today remains armed and ready to defend its own.
SOURCE C: MEXICO (El Centro 2019)
MATAMOROS-BROWNSVILLE BRIDGE, U.S.-Mexico border — U.S. asylum seekers camped out in a dangerous Mexican border town occupied a bridge to Brownsville, Texas on Thursday, leading to the closure of the crossing, witnesses and authorities said.
Hundreds of the migrants have been camped for weeks on the end of the bridge in Matamoros, Mexico, a city known for cartel control of people trafficking and gang violence.
Many of those camped out are awaiting court dates for hearings in the United States weeks or months later under a U.S. policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
Video shot by a Reuters photographer showed men, women and children, some lying on blankets, mid-way across the bridge over the Rio Grande. The path into the United States was blocked by a razor wire-topped gate, behind which stood dozens of U.S. border agents.
Some on the bridge said they were trying to cross as a group into the United States, and were frustrated that court dates kept on being pushed backwards, leaving them uncertain of how long they would be stuck in Mexico.
“We want to argue to cross over — we didn’t ask to be in Mexico, they sent us here unjustly,” said a man who declined to give his name. He said he had a court date in the United States.
SOURCE D: CHILE (BBC 2019)
Antofagasta, Chile – Thousands of Chileans rallied in major cities across the country on Monday, marking a month since protests over inequality and injustice erupted in the country.
Despite a series of concessions, protesters have promised to stay in the streets until the government meets specific demands for systemic change and improved social conditions.
The protests initially started in mid-October when secondary students in the capital Santiago protested against a metro fare increase. Since then, however, the demonstrations have mushroomed, with protesters taking to the streets against the country’s political-economic model and the police crackdown on the demonstrations. The key demands of protesters include ensuring there’s a constitutional assembly, higher pensions, wages, affordable healthcare and education.
“Chile was posited as the oasis of Latin America but the reality is it never was,” Akemi Matsubara, a 21-year-old law student, told Al Jazeera.
Marches and rallies continue on a daily basis and some have rivalled mobilisations in the late 1980s against General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Thousands of people were killed and forcibly disappeared for political reasons during Pinochet’s 1973-1990 rule.
“We experience the legacy of the dictatorship but we did not live through the transition,” said Matsubara.
“We have never seen anything like this,” she said while participating in a university building occupation in Antofagasta, a city 1,400km (870 miles) north of the capital.
In a statement on Sunday night, President Sebastian Pinera said the government had listened to the legitimate and just demands of millions of Chileans. Citizens would have the last word on a new constitution and the government was willing to consider raising pensions by more than 20 percent, he said.
“We are aware that the measures we have announced and will announce will not solve all the problems immediately,” he said. “The outcome of these past four weeks is not yet written.”
SOURCE E Zimbabwe: (Africa Unites Nov. 2019)
Civil servants in Zimbabwe are demanding higher pay as economic conditions in the southern African country continue to deteriorate.
Growing discontent in the public sector is a further challenge to the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa as it struggles to battle soaring inflation, collapsing confidence in the country’s multiple currencies, the effects of an acute drought and rolling power cuts.
A small group of civil servants marched in Harare, the capital, on Wednesday. Authorities allowed the demonstration but deployed a heavy police presence. Organisers of the protest talked about “a real crisis of existence”.
David Dzatsunga, the secretary general of the Apex Council, a grouping of government workers’ unions representing 230,000 employees, said civil servants should be described as “civil slaves”.
“No matter what happens, we have made a statement as civil servants [today] that we are dying and we are dying slowly,” he said. “Even others who were supposed to march with us in solidarity cannot come. I don’t know what we should do. I think our conversations must now be around what is it we should do as workers in this country. Our situation is dire.”
Inflation in Zimbabwe has reached 175% and basic goods – including food and medicine – are increasingly rare. Fuel prices have quadrupled since the start of the year.
Obert Masaraure, leader of Artuz, which represents rural teachers, said that many of his union’s members earned less than US$40 (£31) per month, barely enough to buy flour, sugar and cooking oil for a family of four.
“Our members are severely incapacitated. They can’t afford the basics,” Masaraure said.
Mnangagwa took power after Robert Mugabe, the former president, was ousted in a military takeover nearly two years ago.
Mnangagwa, a former spy chief, won a disputed election in 2018 with a pledge to revive the economy, tackle widespread corruption and end the country’s international isolation.
The government has launched a series of initiatives aimed at bolstering the economy, and earlier this week the Zimbabwe anti-corruption commission (Zacc) detained a cabinet minister for abuse of office alleged to have cost the government $3.7m. Officials at the commission said further arrests could be expected.
However, Mnangagwa has been either unable or unwilling to push through measures that might have convinced investors and multilateral institutions to provide the funds to resuscitate the economy.