3 qquestions

1. My ex-room mate (who is still my best friend) and I constantly disagreed about the upkeep of our apartment. At first the arguments centered around which tasks each of us were responsible for in terms of cleaning and organizing. For instance, if a dirty dish was left out, it was the responsibility of the person who used the dish to clean it. Or, if one person made a mess, they ought to clean it up. These initial arguments centered around the first point of policy conflict: the argument of fact. We could never quite agree on who contributed more to the mess, therefore we could never agree on who should clean what. Even when this argument was settled by doling out a legitimate division of the work, the point of conflict then became the fact that my roommate did not want to clean at all. His justification for this is that cleanliness is not necessarily important to him. He can live with a little mess as long as it doesn’t get in his way. For me, however, I feel that a clean space and clean utilities and utensils enables me to stay focused on other things like schoolwork. So, after the point of conflict between us being a confusion on the facts of who used what and who needs to clean what, the point of conflict became a difference in values. He felt very little need to clean and stay clean, whereas I felt that cleaning and staying clean is a very important factor in being productive. So, our different values on household upkeep revolved around the point of policy conflict of differing global values. The nature of this fifth point of policy conflict is such that it is very difficult to resolve it, as one or both parties must compromise their values in order to reach a solution. Therefore, our solution was to live in separate places the next year.


2. Savio’s main point in making this analogy between the civil rights movement and the students’ rights issue at Berkley is to show the universal nature of the bureaucratic mindset, which operates on the idea that everything is fine the way it is and change or push for change is a mere disruption or annoyance to the current environment. He makes an allusion to Kafka’s texts in which a common theme involves people trying to navigate through a world in which change is impossible and the status quo must be maintained. These stories often focus on a main character who is hurt by and feels the hardships of this bureaucratic environment. Thus Savio’s allusion to Kafka’s writing works on the level of relating those hopeless emotions of the burden of bureaucracy to the reader, whom he is trying to convince that bureaucracy, whether in Mississippi or Berkley, is a harmful thing. In other words, he uses Kafka’s negative portrayal of a bureaucratic and static world to frame the situation of student rights at Berkley in the same portrayal.
3. Obama’s point in discussing the cause of his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, rather than the fact of the relationship, the procedure of the relationship, or the value of that relationship, is so that the reader can understand why Obama would associate with a person with such radical views. While valuing the relationship as good or bad would help Obama either distance himself from or locate himself near the reverend’s political views, explaining the cause of the relationship to the reader helps the reader understand why he had relations with him, but still allows him to distance himself from a polarized political viewpoint.