This collage portrays how evil and intense war actually is but how we see it most of the time in movies or shows. They make it look very patriotic and heroic while most of the time real war is not as perfect and beautiful as it seems and there are a lot of deaths and emotional struggles that come with the patriotism and heroism.

In the chapter “On a Rainy River” from Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, O’Brien defines courage on page two as “…an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.” (Obrien 38)

 

This makes me believe that every time there is a little act of courage, it builds up and then when there is a moment when you have a big decision that requires a lot of courage and you are ready for it and can be prepared for it. In this case, it was deciding whether or not Tim should join the war that he did not want to fight but because he was drafted and did not want to let down his family, friends, or country.

 

I think that I would define courage as the ability to do something even if you are afraid to do that task because there is a danger or there could be a negative outcome. There are a lot of other words that are similar to courage but none of them actually mean the same thing. There are words such as bravery, fearlessness or valor but none of those mean the same thing as courage. Courage is often times very personal and a problem or issue that you are afraid to face. Bravery and fearlessness are more after the fact. The dictionary defines bravery as “courageous behavior or character.” You need to be courageous in order to be brave or fearless and it takes courage to be brave or fearless especially when saving yourself or another. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQjnW3_78a8

 

In the talk that Simon gives, he has a few main points, he says that courage is something that you feel that is external and that you do it to help someone else even if it puts their life before yours. He also said that he had talked to many people who had done courageous acts and why they did it and the response was unanimous; they did it because they knew the people standing next to them would have done the same.

 

This relates to my definition and the book because Tim O’Brien really didn’t want to fight this war but it wasn’t until he was on the boat on the river when he realized that all of those people along the shore would have done the same for him. He knew that if he ran to Canada he would betray each and every one of them. In my definition, I mentioned that it is also a mental difficulty because you need to be strong and know that you are doing the right thing even if it makes you uncomfortable. 

Now you know what it truly means to be courageous and why people like Tim O’Brien do the courageous acts that they do. They are courageous because they want to save the people next to them because they know that they would do the same.

Hi, Thank you for visiting my blog! Today I will tell you all about my life and the different activities I do! 

To begin, I come from a Family of 5, my Mom and Dad, my older brother Paul (18) and my younger sister Gail (13). I also have two dogs, a white Shih Tzu poodle named Scrappy(8) and a black Schnauzer poodle named Chase(7). Some of the activities that my family and I do is go skiing. Every year we go to Colorado to go skiing over spring break in Breckenridge. We also go to our lake house in Michigan a lot. It is right near Warren Dunes state park so we go for hikes in the park and spend a lot of time at the beach. We have a stand-up paddleboard that we like to use to jump off while on the lake. 

One of my hobbies is volleyball. I am a setter for both our school team and for my club team. I started playing volleyball when I was in 8th grade and enjoy the sport a lot. I hope to play throughout the rest of high school and into college. My club team was Breaker volleyball but on Tuesday I tried out for a different club called 630 which is where I will play for this season.

 When I was younger I also played basketball. I started when I was in the 1st grade playing on a YMCA team but after that, I joined a Lithuanian Travel Team where I played since 3rd grade till 5th. That program was very intense so I switched to a Supreme Courts team called Illinois Attack. After that, I finally realized that I just wasn’t as interested in basketball as I used to be. 

I also had a pretty busy summer. I worked four jobs and went to a couple of summer camps.

One of the four jobs that I worked at over the summer was as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant called Friacos. I would often work on the weekends because that is when they were the busiest. My job was to give people chips and salsa as well as clean the tables once people left. I wou.d also have to occasionally wash the dishes. The second job that I had was mowing my neighbor’s lawns. I not only mowed my family’s lawn, but I mowed 4 other neighbors’ lawns. The third job that I had was helping my uncle in his factory in Chicago. I would work two days a week and would drive all the way down to Chicago to help him assemble picture frames for his company called Alpina Manufacturing. My fourth and final job was as a camp counselor at a Lithuanian camp in Manchester Michigan where I was the counselor for 5th-grade boys. This leads me to my next topic, my summer camps! The first summer camp I had was a volleyball camp that was on Monday and Tuesday nights. It was pretty relaxed and was fun. We would scrimmage a lot and had a tournament at the end. In the middle of the summer, I had my Lithuanian Catholic camp which was also a lot of fun. Then at the end of the summer, I had another volleyball camp but this one was way more intense. It was specifically for setter and was a week-long and was at Benedictine University. Every day we would get there at 9 in the morning and would play, eat lunch, play, eat dinner, play and then go home at 9 at night. I had a very busy summer but I am very glad that I did everything I did because it was very fun. 

 

Thank you for visiting and reading my blog and I hope you learned a lot more about me and some of the things I have done in the past few years!

 

Hello, my name is Peter and I play volleyball and go to Naperville North. The time is currently 2:49