Estevan Contreras Ms. Lehmann English 1-1A 15 November 2018 Survival is not selfish Do you think survival is selfish? That is the million-dollar question today. This essay will argue that survival is not selfish, as is proven by authors Louise Erdrich, Laurence Gonzales, and Lane Wallace. The first author who shows survival is not selfish is Louise Erdrich.
In Erdrich’s short story “ The Leap,” the author proves survival is not selfish. The narrator explains how her mother was in a blindfolded trapeze act when the tent where the performance was taking place was struck by lighting, causing the tent to collapse. While the tent collapsed, the husband fell and the wife didn’t try to save him. She didn’t try because she was pregnant and was thinking about the baby, not herself. The narrator explains,“ My mother once said that I’d be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of falling. Perhaps, at the time, she was teaching me to dive off a board at the town pool, for I associated the idea with midair somersaults. But I also think she meant that even in that awful doomed second one could think, for she certainly did”(Erdrich 342). By saying this, Erdrich is trying to convey that while a person is falling that even though it seems like it only takes a second to hit the ground, in that second you can think of a lot. In that one second the mother decided to saved herself and her unborn child. Another instance where survival is not selfish is when the mother goes into a burning building to save her other daughter. “ I didn’t see her leap through air, only heard the sudden thump and looked out my window. She was hanging by the backs of her heels from the new gutters we had put in that year, and she was smiling”(Erdrich 346). The mother risked her life to save her daughter’s life from the burning building. The daughter just sits in her room like the rules say, and if her mother hadn’t acted, she would’ve died. This proves that survival is not selfish. There are other authors who prove survival is not selfish: Laurence Gonzales is the such author.
Survival is proven not to be selfish in Gonzale’s “Deep Survival”. Gonzales discusses a group of pilots who survive by working together. He writes,” all at once, it hit me that I might actually lose them. Those million dollar pilots could die”(Gonzales 331). Kern’s, a survival school teacher, fears that the others might die gave him the strength to survive and save the others. Gonzales also provides an example of how survival is not selfish. He talks about people who die when they have all the necessary supplies to live but don’t use them. Gonzales writes,’” Searchers are always amazed to find the people who have died while in possession of everything they needed to survive. John Leach writes that,“ Victims have been recovered from life rafts with a survival box unopened and the necessary contents unused”(Gonzales 327). People who have supplies, who can survive, don’t. Their instincts wouldn’t allow them to survive, even when they could’ve survived. So why is someone who isn’t frozen and uses things at their disposal considered selfish?
Lane provides the most compelling evidence that selfishness is not required for survival. In the article “Is Survival Selfish”, Wallace proves survival isn’t selfish by using the example of him and his friend having drinks in in Grand Central Station in 2007 when an underground steam pipe exploded. “Some people were crying, others were screaming, others were on their cell phones...but the crowd, for the most part, was not doing the one thing that would increase everyone's chances of survival, if in fact a terrorist bomb with God knows what inside it had just gone off--namely, moving away from the area”(Wallace 318). People whose self-preservation is weaker than others caused more harm to themselves and others by just screaming, watching and , recording. They acted as if they were helpless when all the situation asked for was common sense, but who am I to say it was as simple as walking out like Wallace and his friend? Wallace gives another example of how survival is not selfish later in his article. He uses the story of a plane crash survivor who saved herself while others froze, waiting for a hero to save them like damsels in distress. “After realizing that the people around her were too paralyzed to react, she took direct action, crawling over several rows of people to get to the exit. She got out of the plane and survived. Very few others in the plane, which was soon consumed by smoke and fire, did”(Wallace 318). So why would anyone consider her selfish for not helping? Most people get annoyed by someone giving them advice when they didn’t ask for it so why is it different when they need to be saved from their own paralyzing fear?. Why is it, her responsibility to save them? Like a lot of people say, “If I'm to save you, who’s to save me?”
The opposing side has presented plenty of evidence. However, I am about to prove why all their statements are wrong. I have question for those who claim survival is selfish is, do any of you want to be a firefighter, police officer, or a soldier? If not, then by your own justifications, you are selfish. By this, I mean that you are not risking your life for others on a day-to-day basis, so you must be selfish. You're not running into a burning building; you’re not rescuing people from explosions, and you're not risking your life to protect others, so you must be selfish. If survival is selfish in general, then people who survive life-threatening diseases must be selfish because they survived without saving someone else with the same disease. The argument that survival is selfish is wrong
In conclusion, this essay has proven without a shadow of a doubt that survival is not selfish by using three articles written by three different authors with three different viewpoints. In Erdich’s paragraph, I state that the mother isn’t selfish because she saves herself, which in turn saves her unborn daughter and how she saved her other daughter from a burning building. In the next paragraph, I talk about how people who have the necessary supplies die and how an air pilot trainer saves a group of pilots from death. Wallace’s paragraph is where I talk about her and friend reacting calmly to an explosion while others go crazy. After examining all the evidence, have decided whether or not survival is selfish.
Reflections 1. List one thing you've learned from writing this paper that you can apply to other writing assignments. What will that look like?
I learned how to be persuasive and how to get my point across. I can apply this to other papers by show my ideas more clearly.
2. Identify a specific revision you were asked to make and explain why (this can be at any stage of the writing process). How did you revise? What did you learn?
One revision i had to do a lot of is commas and apostrophes. I had to go through multiple times and put or remove them. I learned to to work harder on my knowledge of punctuation.
3. What are the conventions of an Argumentative essay and how did you meet those in this assignment?
In an Argumentative essay you must prove yourself right while proving your opponent wrong. I think I did so by using simple logic and show evidence against them.
4. Given more time to work on this assignment, how would you improve it?
If given more time I would take more time with my grammar and make better decisions on what to write.
5. What is one thing you're proud of in this paper?
In this paper I’m most proud that I had few grammar mistakes and that I did really well following the rules of Argumentative essays.