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The army's organizational culture
The army's organizational culture
The army's organizational culture
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I was always admiring the military people. This dangerous job requires more than just physical strength. It is mentally hard. A lot of them got gray hair by the age of 35. Besides the potential life threatening situations and constant travelling they have to follow orders. And it is not like orders from your general manager. Military guys has to live by those orders. Their “managers” tell them when to eat, what to wear, how to speak, who they can socialize with. There is almost no personal life. Sounds pretty strict and harsh. But there is one other institute which goes beyond that. They have the strict rules about what you suppose to think and feel.
That is organized religion. When I read “Salvation” by Langston Hughes I almost physically
felt the confusion and the frustration of that little boy. Do not take me wrong. I am not atheist by any stretch. But I am not a member of any churches. The main reason for it is church crowd. Persons like that poor boy’s aunt ruining the whole idea of church. People come to God in order to find their inner peace. It is a sacred and personal experience. How can anybody tell that you doing it wrong? But aunts like that will not leave you along. They think it is very important to explain to you which way to love Jesus, how to feel the blessing and what to think about every letter in the bible: “Are you saved yet? Are you saved yet? It is about time to be saved!” They are worse than used car salesmen. Come on! Mind you own inner peace! The situation becomes completely ugly when little kids got involved. Most of the children feel just as much as they have been told to feel. All that ceremonies for them are just another strange and awkward ritual of the adults. I had no idea what am I supposed to feel and think when I had to go to the icon with a candle, back the Russian Orthodox church. I thought that God is similar to Santa, and one day they will tell that he does not exist either. So, I think is wrong and cruel to put kids through something like in that story. Let them to be just kids. There is now reason to overcomplicate their life. Do not steal the happy simplicity from the childhood.
An analysis of “Salvation” Langston Hughes, in his essay “Salvation” writes about his experience as a young boy, at the age of 12, where he finds himself being inducted into a local church. An analysis of Hughes’ essay will describe and elaborate on both emotional and social pressures. He reaches out to an audience of adults find themselves in the position to influence a child’s thoughts, or ideals. Hughes’ message to the reader is that adults can easily manipulate a child’s ideals by pressuring them into doing something they do not truly wish to do.
1920’s Harlem was a time of contrast and contradiction, on one hand it was a hotbed of crime and vice and on the other it was a time of creativity and rebirth of literature and at this movement’s head was Langston Hughes. Hughes was a torchbearer for the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and musical movement that began in Harlem during the Roaring 20’s that promoted not only African-American culture in the mainstream, but gave African-Americans a sense of identity and pride.
Writer and member of the 1920’s literary movement, Langston Hughes, in his autobiographical essay, Salvation, elucidates the loss of innocence and faith due to the pressure of accepting a concept that he has yet to acknowledge. Hughes’ purpose is to describe his childhood experience of the burden to be saved by Jesus, resulting in his loss of faith. He adopts a solemn, yet disappointing tone to convey his childhood event and argues the unqualified religious pressure.
The world wants us to take part in things that we might not want to but we feel pressured by society or yourself. In the story, Salvation, Langston Hughes implied this perfectly. “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved” (McMahan, Day, Funk, and Coleman 279).
This paper will not bore with the definition of a profession. The United States Army is about more than words, it is about action. The action of over 238 years of tradition and service. The Army is a profession. A profession requires its members to adhere to prolonged training and learn specialized skills. A member of a profession must wholly commit himself and his skills to a calling which is entrusted by the public. A profession provides its members with intrinsic value which motivates beyond financial gain. The Army is a higher calling which demands all of these qualities and more.
In most people's lives, there comes a point in time where their perception changes abruptly; a single moment in their life when they come to a sudden realization. In Langston Hughes' 'Salvation', contrary to all expectations, a young Hughes is not saved by Jesus, but is saved from his own innocence.
In Langston Hughes’ short narrative, “Salvation”, Langston struggles with his belief and feels pressured to conform to the church. He struggles with his faith as his family and the church push him to being saved. Hughes does not want to upset his own family and the church for not being saved. This causes him to lie about “seeing Jesus” to avoid sitting alone on the mourners’ bench and feeling different from everyone surrounding him. As a twelve year old, he most likely did not want to feel different from his peers and wanted to feel accepted. Peer pressure from family members and people one cares about can lead one to believe that they a disappointment and guilty that they are letting their loved ones down.
Langston Hughes- Pessimism Thesis Statement: In the poems “Weary Blues”, “Song for a Dark Girl” and “Harlem” the author Langston Hughes uses the theme of pessimism through the loss of faith, dreams and hope. First, one can look at the theme of pessimism and the correlation to the loss of faith. One can see that in “Song for a Dark Girl” an African American girl is sadden by the loss of her love. For this young and innocent girl to have to lose someone she loved so young.
Langston Hughes ' "Salvation" is about the life of a twelve-year-old boy. The essay talks about an episode from his life, an episode that helps him re-create his understanding about his religious beliefs that were significantly different as compared to the beliefs of his Auntie Reed. The boy then narrates the incident that according to him "saved him from sin" and gave him an insight into the truth of religion and faith in God. The narrator begins by telling that there was a special church meeting that preached about religious revival. His Aunt Reed was a part of the meeting too. She used to tell the boy that when he attained salvation, he would witness the presence of Jesus Christ in the form of a divine light
In Langston Hughes’s Salvation, Hughes makes describes many differences between the his and the congregation’s perception of biblical acceptance. As a boy, Hughes was vividly told by his aunt that in accepting Jesus, he would “see a light, and something happened to you inside”. Being young, he believed that he had to actually see an incarnation of Jesus in order to be saved. When surrounded by the older crowd in church, Hughes anticipates a kind of “great awakening” but his expectations are met with nothing. He does not understand why he can not find Jesus while the congregation is in the midst of praising.
After reading the short story “Salvation” by Langston Hughes and an excerpt from Black Boy by Richard Wright, it is apparent to the reader that both stories reflect how young African American males perceive church. Both experiences in church talk about how the idea of God/ faith is imposed upon young Hughes and Wright by loved ones as well as society. However, each character undergoes the internal conflict of whether or not to conform. The validity of the central idea, individual versus society, is revealed through both character’s choices to either be the pariah within their community or fall under peer pressure in order to attain false acceptance.
Langston Hughes's stories deal with and serve as a commentary of conditions befalling African Americans during the Depression Era. As Ostrom explains, "To a great degree, his stories speak for those who are disenfranchised, cheated, abused, or ignored because of race or class." (51) Hughes's stories speak of the downtrodden African-Americans neglected and overlooked by a prejudiced society. The recurring theme of powerlessness leads to violence is exemplified by the actions of Sargeant in "On the Road", old man Oyster in "Gumption", and the robber in "Why, You Reckon?"
In Langston Hughes 's definition essay entitled "Salvation" he discusses the social and emotional pressures that effect young people. He pulls in his own experiences from being an active member in his church, and the moment he was supposed to experience revival of twelve. Hughes 's purpose for writing this definition essay is to show the peer pressures and internal conflicts that come from both church and the religious community, and his personal experiences that led to the pressures that were put upon him in his youth. The audiences that “Salvation” was pointed towards are adults; it shows the pressures that are put upon the youth, while the child does not fully grasp the idea being expressed to them. Langston Hughes 's overall message to
On the other hand, the military lifestyle carries much more responsibility than the civilian lifestyle. There is always the threat of heading into a combat zone and having to risk your life. You have to be on time to work, there are no "I got stuck in traffic" excuses. You must always be well-groomed, and live up to the working and presentation standards of your specific military branch. You never have the option of saying "no" or just quitting
Langston Hughes and Religion Langston Hughes in several poems denounced religion, inferring that religion did not exist any longer. In reading these poems, the reader can see that Hughes was expressing his feelings of betrayal and abandonment, against his race, by religion and the church. Hughes had a talent for writing poems that would start a discussion. From these discussions, Hughes could only hope for realization from the public, of how religion and the church treated the Black race. Hughes wrote two poems that generated a lot of discussion about religion and African-Americans.