Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- Final Post

Now that I have finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I have very mixed emotions. While I definitely liked the book, it was absolutely not what I was expecting and it was extremely confusing throughout the entire thing. I have never read a book like this before, but there were many pages that I was extremely confused about and didn’t understand why they were in the book and what they had to do with the story. Many of the pictures, the numbers, the one word pages, and such just didn’t seem to make much sense to me, but I guess that this is just a style of writing that I am not used to. As far as the topic goes, this book did not have the concept of September 11 that I thought it would. While the book was obviously about a kid whose father died in the September 11 terrorist attacks, this wasn’t really talked about much and the book was mainly about Oskar’s journey to find the lock hat fit the key. I would have liked if the book had more to do with September 11 and what occurred on that day, but that just wasn’t the angle that Jonathan Safran Foer took when he wrote it. Overall, I definitely am happy that I read the book because while it was a sad book, it was inspirational in the fact that I could see how Oskar overcame his sadness and was able to outlet this sadness in other ways by doing things, such as searching for the key, that his father had a connection to. I enjoyed reading this book, although I was very confused throughout it, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes to read inspirational stories or wants to hear about the struggles that a young boy went through after his father died and the interesting ways in which he coped with his pain and sadness.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- Post 5

I haven’t commented on Oskar’s relationship with his grandma yet, and I think it is something that I definitely need to talk about. Throughout the book, Oskar and his grandma have had a very good relationship with each other. Throughout Oskar’s life, including his time of sadness after his father’s death, his grandma has always been there for him. Oskar’s grandma lives across the street from them on the same floor of a different apartment building, so they can see each other through their windows. Oskar is constantly talking to his grandma via walkie-talkie, and it appears as if they have a great relationship with each other. I think that this is great for Oskar and that it really is helpful to him throughout his time of mourning. Although he has his mother for support, having another figure that could provide him with the support he needs is amazing and is definitely something that I think can truly be of a great benefit to him. Grandma provides the friendship and support that Oskar needs in his life to get through his hard time, and I really think that losing her would be just like losing his father all over again. With his father gone, Oskar has begun to adopt his grandmother as his other parental figure. I think that it is very interesting how something like this could happen so quickly after a tragedy such as the death of Oskar’s father, but the fact that he has this available to him and has the ability to turn to her for help is great.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- Post 4

Within the next few pages, we learn that Oskar’s father called the house five different times before he died and left messages on the answering machine. Oskar listened to these messages, and in an effort to protect his mom from sadness, he removed the phone and replaced it with the exact same model so that she wouldn’t know. We get to hear one of the messages that his father left. His father said things like, “I just wanted you to know that I’m OK. Everything. Is. Fine. Hopefully the firemen will be. Up here by then. I’ll call.” Just the fact that Oskar listened to the messages that his father left is very scary to me, but the fact that the messages were his father telling them that he loved them and that he was okay is something that I cannot even imagine. Part of me wonders if Oskar’s father would be happy that Oskar hid these messages from his dad or if he would have wanted her to hear them too. Oskar made this decision quickly without really weighing the pros and cons of his decision, but I wonder if he made the right decision by hiding these messages from his mom and not showing them to her. Oskar continues on his journey to find the lock that matches the key that he found as he goes to many different houses and businesses, asking if he can try his key in their lock. I wonder if in the chapters to come, if Oskar will eventually find the lock that he is searching for or if it was for something that was in his dad’s office in the World Trade Center and he will never find it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- Post 3

After breaking a vase, Oskar finds a mysterious key that was hidden inside an envelope.  He checked every single lock in his house that he could find, but it did not work on any of them. He decides to make it his mission to figure out where this key came from and goes to the locksmith to see if he can get some more information. Oskar finds out that it is a very old key, probably to a lockbox or a safe. Oskar decides that he is going to go on a mission for 8 months in order to find the lock that the key belongs to. He had no clue where the key was going to belong, but he knew that it was a connection that he had with him and his father, and he wanted to figure out where the key fit. I think that this makes a lot of sense and I completely understand why Oskar would want to do this. After his father had died, Oskar finally found something that he knew was important to his dad but didn’t know what it was. By deciding to go on this search for the lock that the key fit, Oskar was keeping his dad’s spirits alive in a sense because he was pursuing something that was important to his dad and trying to figure out what the connection was. This chapter continues and has some odd pictures. I am very confused as to what many of these pictures have to do with the book, because there are some of naked monkeys, some of geometric shapes, and some of just random things that I don’t see any connection to the book with. There is one picture that I found to be very powerful. It is a picture of a man or a woman jumping out of the World Trade Center. Although this picture isn’t really referred to in the book, just seeing someone jumping out of the building is terrifying. These people knew that they were going to die from the crash and the subsequent explosion, and they decided to jump out of the building for a quicker and less painful death. I don’t think I would ever be able to do something like that, and if I were in New York and saw that happening, I don’t know what I would do. It is so scary to think that people had no other option but to jump from extremely high heights out of a building, knowing that they would smack the floor and die.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- Post 2

The next chapter began with a story about Oskar and how he made a bracelet for his mom to wear to her husband’s funeral. Using Morse code, Oskar converted his father’s last voice message into a bracelet using different beads to mean different things. There is another reference to the term “heavy boots,” which I am beginning to associate with sadness. It appears that every time Oskar mentions “heavy boots,” he is talking about someone or something that made him feel depressed or sad. This seems to make sense because a heavy pair of boots would weigh someone down and cause them to be a less effective person, and I can see how these two things can be related to each other. Since his father’s death, Oskar is definitely feeling the pain and the result of his “heavy boots” as he is trying to cope with his father’s death and recover from the pain and sadness that he is going through. Another thing that we learn is that Oskar loves to invent. Even if he isn’t creating anything tangible, he loves to think of ideas and invent things. This was something that he loved to do with his father when he was alive, and it is definitely something that makes him miss his father. In my opinion, having to think of something like that that would remind him of his father could be completely devastating. I think that I would be too scared to want to think of something like that because it would give me memories of my father and make me really sad again. As I continue to read this book, I am going to try to keep an eye on the way in which Oskar copes with his loss and see if he does things to remind himself of his father and if these types of things make him sad and miss his father.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- Post 1

The book that I decided to read for this semester was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Some classes read this book during Sophomore English, and after talking to some of my friends that took it, it seems like a very interesting book that I would want to read. I have been very interested on the topic of September 11 ever since it happened, and I think that this would be a great book for me to read. I have only read the first few chapters so far, and I think the book is a little bit confusing. It starts off in a young boy’s voice, talking about his father and how he misses him. In the first chapter, Oskar talks about his limo ride to the cemetery. His father died during the September 11 attacks in New York, and his family is just going to bury him at this point in the book. The next chapter begins as a letter from Oskar’s grandfather to his dead son, Oskar’s dad. This letter is a bit confusing because it talks about some obscure topics such as the difference between yes and no and how his father had each of these tattooed on his hands in order to communicate with others. With his lost voice, Oskar’s grandfather helps reflect upon the true meaning of life and shoes how he was still able to live a normal life and be a successful person without speaking. He began to verbalize things by writing them down, but I am not really sure what this is going to have to do with the book. I want to hear more about how he died and what happened that day, so hopefully that will come up soon.

DWI Deaths: Is It Murder?

Recently, I watched a clip from an episode of 60 Minutes on CBS titled DWI Deaths: Is It Murder? While extremely sad this video really hit home with me, and I really thought that it properly addressed the ideas that I was trying to address in my project. This video was really powerful and I think that it would be great for everyone who visits my display at the Marketplace of Ideas to watch it, so I am going to have it up on a laptop. The story is about the Flynn family. The Flynns were at a wedding and in order to remain safe and be able to dance and party all night, they hired a limo to take them home from the wedding. While they made an appropriate, safe decision in order to keep themselves safe, Martin Heidgen, a drunk, 24-year old insurance salesman, unfortunately was not as smart. Despite his friends warning him not to drive, with a BAC of over three times the legal driving limit, Heidgen got in his pickup truck and was driving the wrong way down the interstate that the Flynns were on. He slammed into their limo, instantly killing the limo driver, decapitating the Flynn’s beautiful 7-year-old daughter, and causing life threatening injuries to the remaining passengers in the limo. Although it is extremely rare in America, Heidgen was charged with murder by depraved indifference, a much more serious charge than the standard manslaughter charge that is usually given in these cases. Manslaughter comes with a sentence of probation to 15 years, while murder comes with a mandatory penalty of 15 years to life. Kathleen Rice, the district attorney who prosecuted the case, has become a forefront in the fight against drunk drivers. She understands the horrible ways in which a poor decision can change the lives of an innocent family, and she has been working day in and day out in order to change the way in which our nation views and punishes drunk driving. Rice has made it her passion to go against drunk drivers and prosecute them to the fullest. Driving drunk is “as inevitable as taking a gun and firing it at an individual who’s standing five feet away from you,” she says. It is something that can easily be avoided, and for that reason, it is unacceptable that people can get away with murdering someone else and blaming their actions on the effects of the alcohol.

Should Your Car Test if You’ve Been Drinking?

This article, from CBS News, talks about the ROADS SAFE Act and both sides of the argument about whether or not it is a good idea. The first thing that this article mentioned, that I had yet to understand, was that this technology would be an optional tool to put into cars. The ROADS SAFE Act is just for the funding to research the technology. After the technology is designed, it would be up to the government to decide if this would be something required for every car or an optional feature. While there are many people who are for this type of technology, there are definitely people who are against it, especially because they feel as if it will be something required in cars and that it will become very intrusive and that it could cause people who were not drunk from being unable to drive their cars. While the legal limit is .08, some people feel as if this technology would be set so that the cars detected alcohol at .03 or .04. The reason for this is because alcohol needs time to work its way through the body. Someone could have a bunch of quick drinks and then get into their car, but their blood alcohol level would still be below .08 because they hadn’t given the alcohol time to absorb into their bloodstream. Setting the limit on these devices to a lower blood alcohol level would help prevent these types of situations because the system would detect the alcohol even before it increased the blood alcohol level, but it also poses a problem for the person that goes and has one drink at dinner and is still capable of driving home. As stated before, this technology could potentially save 9,000 lives by eliminating the possibility of drunk driving, lives that are invaluable.

Representative Jerry F. Costello

I read a letter that Representative Jerry F. Costello, who is a Democrat from Illinois, wrote regarding the ROADS SAFE Act and his opposition. I thought that it would be very interesting to read an opinion of someone who was opposed to the act in order to get the other perspective. Costello raised some very good points on why the ROADS SAFE Act is not a good idea, and I think that there are definitely things that would need to be thought of before this t4echnology was created. The first thing that he mentioned was false positives. There are many medications, mouthwashes, and toothpastes that contain a large amount of alcohol in them. If the system were to detect this alcohol, the car would not start, even though the driver wasn’t drunk. Next, the idea of a device malfunction was introduced. Like any other electronic equipment, it is very likely that the technology would fail. What would happen in a life or death situation when the car couldn’t be started due to an error? Or what if the car was already started and then it malfunctioned and turned the car off? This could create potential dangers that could result in major accidents or fatalities. The last thing that I thought was definitely something that would be important to consider is the price. Currently, our economy is suffering and prices of cars are increasing, but would this technology cause an even greater increase? All of these things would need to be addressed and resolved before these devices could go into production.

Udall, Corker Introduce ROADS SAFE Act

This article that I read goes into more detail about the ROADS SAFE Act and explains what its purpose is. The ROADS SAFE Act was introduced by New Mexico Senator Tom Udall and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker.  The entire legislation was designed to reduce the amount of drunk driving crashes and fatalities by developing new technologies that prevent drunk drivers from starting their vehicles. The funding from this program would go to NHTSA and DADSS who would use this money to explore a variety of emerging technologies such as devices that determine a driver’s blood alcohol level by touching the steering wheel or engine start button. In addition, technology is being researched that would have sensors in a car that would passively monitor a driver’s breath or eye movements in order to determine their sobriety (or lack thereof). The entire purpose of this legislation is to eliminate drunk driving fatalities and save lives because just one drunk driving death should be unacceptable throughout our society.

The ROADS SAFE Act

I read a bill that was introduced to Congress that directly pertains to my topic for this project. This bill that has been introduced to congress is called the Research of Alcohol Detection Systems for Stopping Alcohol-related Fatalities Everywhere Act of 2011, or the ROADS SAFE Act of 2011. This bill was designed as a way to prevent drunk driving injuries and fatalities across the country. Currently, 1/3 of all highway fatalities in the United States are due to alcohol-impaired accidents. If alcohol detection technologies were more widely used throughout the United States to help prevent alcohol-impaired drivers from driving a vehicle, it is estimated that 9,000 road traffic deaths would be prevented. This act asks that $12,000,000 be given to the government for the next 5 years to help develop such technology to help eliminate alcohol-related fatalities.

Drunk Driving: Is the Blood Alcohol Limit Too Liberal?

This article, by TIME magazine, highlighted the differences between the laws in the United States and other countries around the world. In Sweden, the legal BAC limit for drivers is .02, while it is .08 in the U.S. Only 15 other countries throughout the world, besides the U.S., have a limit of .08. Many of the countries in Europe have laws of .05 or lower for BAC levels. As I stated in one of my earlier blog posts, .08 is way too high for the BAC limit. According to the University of Oklahoma Police Department, a 180 pound male would blow a .08 BAC level after consuming six 12 oz beers or five gin-and-tonics over just two hours. This is an extremely large amount of alcohol to be consuming, and the thought of it being a legal amount to drive with is very frightening. Having people on the road after drinking six beers is not safe at all because anybody would be slightly altered after consuming that much alcohol.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 11,773 people died in drug driving related accidents in the United States in 2008. If the United States had a lower limit, this number would definitely be a lot lower. During 2007 in the U.S., 31.7% of traffic fatalities were alcohol related while only 16% of road fatalities in Sweden were related to alcohol. This drastic difference can be attributed to the fact that Sweden changed their BAC threshold from .05 to .02. Similarly, after Switzerland and France both lowered their limits to .05, the amount of alcohol related fatalities almost instantly declined in both cases. It is very obvious that .08 is way too large of a number, and the United States needs to follow in the footsteps of other countries throughout the world and change the laws in order to keep our citizens safe on the roads.