Tracy Chapman Essays - The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Tracy Chapman

Tracy Chapman In Nineteen Eighty-eight Tracy Chapman discharged her self titled introduction collection that remembered echoes of racial distinction all through time. When discharged, Tracy's first hit collection sold unfathomably overall influencing a great many individuals' firm convictions on prejudice is only one year. In Nineteen Eighty-nine she sold ten million collections and won herself three Grammy's. Tracy had herself looking extraordinary so far, in any case, the best had quite recently started for this dark vocalist. On her self titled collection, she had a few hits of which one prompted some tenacious audience members until the end of time contacted. Tracy was one of the principal African American vocalists to appear articulation and emotions on a questionable level about race and force in a turmoiled nation experiencing the delayed repercussions of isolation among blacks and whites. One tune, Fast Car, on her presentation collection prompted the embarkment of who Tracy Chapman the artist was, is and conceivably who she may turn into. This tune, Fast Car is one of her most touchy melodies to brag my ears. Hearing her sing and communicate on such an internal individual level underlines Tracy's quality and assurance. The beat sets a cadence that you will murmur for quite a long time. In the melody Fast Car, Tracy actually relates her life to this quick vehicle, subsequently the title. Numerous individuals don't relate the title of the melody and the understanding while at the same time tuning in to the tune. In my translation the tune is the story of Tracy's life and the crimes that she survives. The tune is a movement more than quite a long while in her life. Quick Car takes us through three organizes in her life. There is no dreary ensemble in this tune either which I find rather intriguing in light of the fact that her ensemble is a mind-blowing movement. Tracy starts her honor winning motivational melody and the primary stage in her life by singing: You got a Fast Car; I need a pass to anyplace; Maybe we can make an arrangement: Maybe together we can get some place. This starting tune states truly that Tracy needs to leave her life and she will leave it with any individual who is happy to go with her. It could in all likelihood be one of the saddest lines in the melody, indicating a profound and unrecognized discouragement. This line by and by I feel identifies with numerous people groups lives, how they need to get away from the one thing they know with expectations of better. Envision what number of individuals can relate with Tracy in those scarcely any expressions. The following refrain in the tune expounds Tracy's good faith towards her past and her future. She sings with persuasiveness: Wherever is better; Started from zero got nothing to lose; Maybe we'll make something; But me myself I have nothing to demonstrate. Tracy sings about despising her life, and how she would like to state it over. I accept she's expressing how she has never known any better yet she holds trust later on. She doesn't figure it will take a lot to change her redundant life. Tracy's subsequent ensemble starts with: You got a quick vehicle and I got a plant o get us out of here; Been working down at the accommodation store; Managed to spare only a tad of cash; We don't need to drive that far, simply cross the outskirt and into the city. You and I can both get occupations lastly understand to be living. In this section I accept she says that she is making the best of her circumstance. Perhaps that implies living life as it has consistently been. In spite of the fact that Tracy lives with he anguishing persistence of her better tomorrow. Everybody has their fantasies and expectations. Tracy may not be as materialistic as others however she is more in contact with her own side which gives the tune extraordinary significance. Tracy develops her show in the third melody however just by explaining more on her past refrain. In this stanza, Tracy raises a genuinely agonizing occasion in her life. This refrain additionally unravels a great deal of the explanation behind her activities and feelings Tracy has managed. She starts: You see my father has an issue. He lives with the container and that is how it is. He state his body unreasonably old for working, I express it's too youthful to even think about looking this way. My mother went off and left him; She needed more from life than he could give: I said someone must deal with him; So I quit school and that is what I did.

How Well Do Families Navigate The Student Loan Process

HomeFinancePrivate LoansHow Well Do Families Navigate The Student Loan Process?This page may contain affiliate links.Nov 4, 2019You’ve done the math and realized that there’s no way to send your child to college without a loan. The loan process for college can seem complicated. In an attempt to find out what parents really experienced when they went through the student loan process, we conducted a survey of the members of our Paying For College 101 Facebook group. Over one hundred and forty-five parents responded to the survey, sponsored by College Ave Student Loans. Heres what they had to say: Informed Parents Make Better College Financial Decisions 83% of respondents with students borrowing a private loan, cosigned a loan for their child to attend college. Nearly 68% said they knew exactly what their monthly payment would be, and 88% said they understood how interest was calculated. Informed parents will hopefully make better decisions, so those numbers made us happy. (Although, of course, we would love for them to be even higher.) Despite this, there were still some respondents who were not as well-versed on the process: We are really clueless on all this loan stuff. Parents got a variety of loans with 59% getting federal student loans (Stafford, subsidized), 24% with private student loans, 12% with a federal Parent PLUS loan, and 5% with a private parent loan. Most parents borrowed less than $5,500 (24%). But 21% borrowed between $5,551 and $10,000, and 18% took out loans for $10,001-15,000. Twenty-seven percent of parents borrowed between $15,001-30,000, and 10% of parents have loans that exceed $30,000. Of the respondents who cosigned for a student loan, nearly 95% said that a parent or family member cosigned for the loan. Know what that means? They are on the hook for paying back the loan if the student doesn’t. Parents obviously know this, but the survey also showed that parents feel the loan process, from finding an endorser to repayment plans and interest rates, is baffling and stressful. And federal loans have a different process from private student loans. Interest rates can be tricky. As one parent said, â€Å"So many lenders give a potential borrower a large range on interest rates and rarely give the lower end of that range. (Its) unfortunate that people who actually pay up on loans are the ones who pay these insanely high interest rates because others borrow more than they can handle and default.† Parents can shop around to find lenders that might offer pre-qualification like College Ave Student Loans. The free tool tells you whether you qualify for a loan and what interest rates you can expect without impacting your credit score. Other parents were even unsure what type of loan they needed: federal student loan, private student, or parent loans, or a federal Parent PLUS loan. â€Å"I don’t understand the EFC!† Some parents wondered about their expected family contribution (EFC). For example, one parent said her EFC was $7,000 but she had to get a $20,000 loan and of course that doesn’t include the interest that will accumulate. The EFC, which is listed on the Student Aid Report, often is perplexing to parents. All of your taxed and untaxed income, including your student’s income, assets like savings and benefits, including unemployment or Social Security, are used in the EFC formula. Colleges take the information from the Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA) including your EFC to calculate your financial aid you might receive. Cost of Attendance (COA) minus Expected Family Contribution (EFC) equals the amount of Financial Need. â€Å"So my family contribution is more like $40,000 for the year not anywhere near $7,000.00,† she wrote. â€Å"I don’t understand what we are doing wrong not getting any financial assistance as I am a single mom making $48,000 a year.† Many parents were confused about how much to borrow and didn’t know about origination fees, which are charged on federal Direct and Parent Plus loans. Less is obviously better, but there are many factors to consider: estimate the total cost for college, borrow for only what your student really needs (tuition, books, room and board – not trivial things), research earning potential after graduation, research various types of loans, and think long-term about what you or your child can ultimately pay back. Here’s a tip: If you can, pay off interest on loans starting while your student is in school. As A Cosigner, Student Loans Can Also Feel Like A Parent’s Loan Parents are confused about the name private â€Å"student loans† because a parent may share responsibility to repay them. The reality is these days, there are few students that can cover the cost of college all on their own. In fact, most families need assistance of some sort to cover college costs. So, when loans are referred to as â€Å"student† loans, many feel it’s a misnomer. Parents are usually very involved in paying back loans, cosigning for private student loans, or even taking out private loans in their own name. To reflect these feelings, a better term might be â€Å"family† education loan. In addition to increasing college costs, the other reason parents are so involved in the loan process is because students generally have no credit history, which means they cannot – usually – borrow money on their own from any private lenders. Instead, parents or another relative must cosign the loan and financial help is based on their income, not the student’s. If parents have bad credit, this often means the student won’t qualify for some loans. â€Å"Many families already have enough debt and now need to add to it with cosigning,† one parent wrote. â€Å"Middle income families just do not qualify for anything today.† If your financing strategy includes federal student loans, Stafford or Direct Loans are in the student’s name and do not require a cosigner. Many of the respondents had different ways to approach the college funding situation Our student would need a cosigner, so we decided to fund her first year and she will have to get scholarships to fund the next 3+ years, said one. We chose to split the cost of college with our child so she will have a better chance of paying off her federal student loans earlier, said another. The best advice for parents about to embark on the financial aid journey. Do your homework. Research loans online. Learn the difference between federal and private loans. Ask questions. â€Å"We treated it like a house mortgage, shopping for rates, consolidation, etc.,† a parent said. â€Å"Also, people need to understand that what worked for one family will not work for another family as there are just too many moving parts to this whole process.† Advice from Parents Many parents, exhausted by the entire college loan experience, offered some advice to their peers who may be at the beginning of this tedious journey. In fact, 47% of parents we surveyed said they would change how they handled the college admissions process to help minimize the amount of loans their family needed to borrow. One parent recommended seeing if lower, in-state tuition at public schools is available to out-of-state students. Many colleges offer students who qualify for in-state or discounted tuition depending on regional, state, and college-specific programs. Some states have agreements with neighboring states that give students in-state tuition at any public school in either state. Many parents stressed the importance of students searching and applying for private scholarships and financial opportunities before it was time to attend college. A survey from College Ave Student Loans conducted by Barnes Noble College InsightsSM found that 80% of students wished they had researched more scholarships. Waiting until the last-minute costs money for something that a student may have been able to receive for free. Private scholarships probably won’t pay for a full ride to college, but they certainly can help with costs. Students can also receive more than one and usually use them at any college. More than one parent wrote that they should have more thoroughly learned how colleges award financial aid. Granted, this is a complex process, but one that every parent who is investing in their child’s education should intently research. Each college has its own methods for processing applications and awarding aid. Financial packages may or may not include loans. Don’t be afraid to ask the college admissions and financial aid staff questions. You want to get the best financial aid package possible, and many times you may be able to negotiate the offer. The college admissions and financial planning process is hard work that requires hours of research and years of planning, starting during a student’s freshman year in high school. The best advice? Don’t procrastinate. If your child plans to attend college, start looking at all options – now.

Do Biodegradable Items Degrade in Landfills

Organic materials â€Å"biodegrade† when they are broken down by other living organisms (such as fungi, bacteria, or other microbes) into their constituent parts, which are in turn recycled by nature as the building blocks for new life. The process can occur aerobically (with the aid of oxygen) or anaerobically (without oxygen). Substances break down much faster under aerobic conditions, as oxygen helps break the molecules apart, a process called oxidation. Landfills Are Too Overcrowded for Trash to Biodegrade Most landfills are fundamentally anaerobic because they are compacted so tightly, and thus do not let much air in. As such, any biodegradation that does take place does so very slowly. â€Å"Typically in landfills, there’s not much dirt, very little oxygen, and few if any microorganisms,† says green consumer advocate and author Debra Lynn Dadd. She cites a landfill study conducted by University of Arizona researchers that uncovered still-recognizable 25-year-old hot dogs, corncobs, and grapes in landfills, as well as 50-year-old newspapers that were still readable. Processing May Inhibit Biodegradation Biodegradable items also may not break down in  landfills if the industrial processing they went through prior to their useful days converted them into forms unrecognizable by the microbes and enzymes that facilitate biodegradation. A typical example is petroleum, which biodegrades easily and quickly in its original form: crude oil. But when petroleum is processed into plastic, it is no longer biodegradable, and as such can clog up landfills indefinitely. Some manufacturers make claims that their products are photodegradable, which means that they will biodegrade when exposed to sunlight. A popular example is the plastic â€Å"polybag† in which many magazines now arrive protected in the mail. But the likelihood that such items will be exposed to sunlight while buried dozens of feet deep in a landfill is little to none. And if they do photodegrade at all, it is only likely to be into smaller pieces of plastic, contributing to the growing microplastics problem and adding to the immense amount of plastic in our oceans. Landfill Design and Technology May Enhance Biodegradation Some landfills are now being designed to promote biodegradation through the injection of water, oxygen, and even microbes. But these kinds of facilities are costly to create and, as a result, have not caught on. Another recent development involves landfills that have separate sections for compostable materials, such as food scraps and yard waste. Some analysts believe that as much as 65% of the waste currently sent to landfills in North America consists of such â€Å"biomass† that biodegrades rapidly and could generate a new income stream for landfills: marketable soil. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Is Best Solution for Landfills But getting people to sort their trash accordingly is another matter entirely. Indeed, paying heed to the importance of the environmental movement’s â€Å"three Rs† (reduce, reuse, recycle) is likely the best approach to solving the problems caused by our ever-growing piles of trash. With landfills around the world reaching capacity, technological fixes are not likely to make our waste disposal problems go away. EarthTalk is a regular feature of E/The Environmental Magazine. Selected EarthTalk columns are reprinted on About Environmental Issues by permission of the editors of E.

Effective Monitoring And Measurement System Throughout The...

Erica Patterson July 14, 2015 MGT645: Project Management Essentials Professor James Marion An effective monitoring and measurement system throughout the project execution can make the difference between a successful project and a failure. Monitoring is just helpful in the event that it is incorporated with the execution stage toward the starting. There is no good reason for an observing action if all the work has been finished as of now and every one of the assets squandered. A system should be set up for this amid the arranging stage and caught up on emphatically. Decide What to measure It is basic to recognize which pointers are to be measured. These ought to be noted in the arranging report and†¦show more content†¦These are key measurements and should be followed in an orderly and powerful way, giving a prepared depiction of where the undertaking is anytime. A percentage of the courses in which projects can be followed. As a group member, your primary obligation is to encourage the group procedure, and that implies keeping group confidence high and the team motivated, particularly when it experiences setbacks. When difficulties arise, team members will look to you for prompts with reference to how they ought to handle the circumstance. Staying positive is key, however don t make light of issues. Members will lose confide in you in case you re not clear about the difficulties they confront. You may not understand the monetary expense your business bears when your team members are despondent. A viable leader knows how to check, keep up and, when essential, enhance staff morale. In the event that you can screen staff spirit, you may be amazed at that it is so natural to get changes when it begins to plunge. I generally think that its fascinating that such a large number of mangers don t believe you can t measure morale. We urge individuals to evaluate, break down, and enhance each other part of the business from client administration to efficiency to return on value - yet worker fulfillment is as far as anyone knows an elusive, something you can t put a number on or

Marketing Strategy of Ookus-Free-Samples-Myassignmenthelp.com

Question: What Is Ookus? How Does It Work?. Answer: Client Overview The name of the organization is Ookus. It is an Australian company that is involved in marketing especially in the hotel industry. Ookus helps one to create an individual dream and share it with friends and other individuals in the same social media platforms. Ookus is a linking marketing strategy to make friends and family link and turns the dreams of individuals into reality (Blythe 2006). The number of employees employed by Ookus in Australia is between 500-600 people employed to work as advertising agents in the digital platform. The employees range from marketers, IT specialists, travel consultants and digital marketing consultants. Goods and Services offered At Ookus, the goods and services offered include advertising for Hidden Valley Resort in Western Australia. It makes the people dream of their desired destinations through Adwords and creative digital content in Hidden Valley (Carter 2011). It promises an ultimate enjoyment in the Resort for a perfect gate away on Fridays and Saturdays. It provides meaningful communication to the end users of the services. When a group of friends take the ultimate enjoyment ride, they earn points for the gate away. This can be redeemed in order for one to take other trips. Key online marketing personnel For digital marketing to be successful, the company has to ensure that it has qualified personnel in its marketing department. The key marketing personnel include the digital marketing manager who is the head of digital marketing at Ookus. Besides the manager, there are marketers who are tech survey and make digital content marketing in different departments. Other key personnel include IT specialists and content writers. Age of the company Due to the growth of social media, the company has grown tremendously. The company is 7 years old and with the wave of digital marketing that is disrupting the market, it is likely to grow in leaps and bounds (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2016). URL The URL of the company is Https//: ookus digital marketing .co. Au. The website age is as old as the company which is 7 years old. The website management is done by the company marketing and IT department. The management of the website is under the key personnel who are employed to make sure that the website is running and up to date. The social media sites such as google +, Facebook, Instagram, and twitter are under the name of the company which is Ookus. Online sales via online and offline As a digital marketing company, the companys sales on the online platform are greatly increasing. For Fridays and Saturdays gate away, the company is increasing its visibility therefore attracting a lot of customers and hence increased sales (Dodson). For offline marketing, the sales have dipped but the marketing manager is trying to increase the sales. Other relevant information includes the prices for various products and the sites for travel at the resort. Market Analysis: Before writing the first word it is important to define who will consume the content and understand our target. The first step is to create a Person who represents your audience. This is the basis not only for the content marketing plan, but for the entire marketing strategy. It is called "marketing or buyer person" and to define it must be taken into account (Ryan). The current potential customers are the young while the current potential competitors are the nearby resorts and hotels. The market is very competitive and the industry is receptive to the competition. They are market leaders and have unique selling points and seasonality of their services. Current Marketing: The website use it for promotion, to increase sales and customer service. The website strength is to make the people closer to the product and services and to avail all relevant information to the customers. Conclusion: The Ad words creates a platform for marketing therefore alighi the company to greatness and having a competitive edge over its rivals. There is increase in sales of the company. Proposed AdWords Strategy Demography: sex, age, geography, income level, occupation, marital status, educational level. Tastes and Style: values, interests, concerns, hobbies, lifestyle, personality, etc. Interaction with the internet: types of users, what kind of sites they visit use of social networks and which ones, which information sites / blogs consult, preferred devices, etc. Consumption habits. Map the content in the different phases of the consumer to plan for daily and weekly plans and budget. There is a proposed success matrix for the company while the target market for the company is mostly the youth who are social and outgoing. The marketing strategy is working as the sales on online digital platform are increasing at a rapid rate. Gone is a fundamental part of starting the content marketing strategy (Kaufman, Horton and a guidebook for executives). But much of the success lies in the distribution of such content. To do this, positioning the content in search engines so that users looking for inf ormation can find it is a fundamental task. Communication and Readability The communication of the company and the marketing strategy should be clear and show the various products and services of the company without vagueness and ambiguity. It should also be reliable and readable to avoid numerous the Adword should be readable and readily available for consumption by the customers (Kingsnorth). The goal of this post is to be a theoretical and practical guide to content marketing that covers the main definitions, best practices, ideas and everything needed to plan, implement and measure a content marketing strategy. In this holiday site, the image and the content of the market is well shown in digital marketing strategies. Digital competitions have acquired great relevance since the explosion of the Internet, and today many experts consider that they are key to the market (Schaffer 2014). The quality determines whether or not the ad appears in a search, the position in which it will appear and the price to pay per click (CPC). This means that the higher the quality of advertisement, the more times it will appear in the best positions and the lower the price to pay to be well positioned References Blythe, Jim. 2006.Marketing. London: SAGE Publications. Carter, Ben. 2011.Digital Marketing For Dummies. Chichester: John Wiley Sons. Chaffey, Dave, and Fiona Ellis-Chadwick. 2016.Digital Marketing. Harlow (GB): Pearson. Dodson, Ian.The Art Of Digital Marketing. Kaufman, Ira Morton, Chris Horton, and managers a guidebook for executives.Digital Marketing. Kingsnorth, Simon.Digital Marketing Strategy. Ryan, Damian.Understanding Digital Marketing. Schaffer, Neal. 2014.Social Marketing Digital Book Set. Wiley.

The Economy Of The Czech Republic Essays - Communist States

The Economy Of The Czech Republic The government of the Czech Republic faced a political and financial crises in 1997 shattered their image as one of the most stable and prosperous post-Communist states. This somewhat new republic, despite the financial tribulation, has been able to reduce their inflation to 10 percent, formed a balanced budget, and hold unemployment down to only 3 percent, since their break away from the former Czechoslovak federation on January 1, 1993. The country's gross domestic product (GDP) expanded in 1994 after losses of nearly 20% during the first few years of the 1990's. The Czech Republic's GDP is currently about $120.8 billion according to a 1999 estimate, and the GDP per capita is posted at around $11,700. The lands of the Czech Republic have always been a part of the most economically modern areas within the European continent. The Communists, when they obtained Czechoslovakia in 1948, created an economic system that was greatly centralized on the government. Nearly all aspects of the Czech economy was controlled by the national government. This government regulated economy also removed almost all external influence by non-Communistic countries. Though the Czech economy held strong by Eastern European standards, the policies produced from the Communist government led to an eventual economic decline in Czechoslovakia. Once the final remains of Communism was scraped out in 1989, a collapse of Czechoslovakia was inevitable because the legacy left behind would be incredibly hard to deal with for the new leaders of this new state. In the early 1990s the post-Communist government quickly converted the economy to a system based on free enterprise. The new governments also adopted several reform policies, including a voucher privatization plan. Under this plan, citizens were given, for a small government fee, coupons which could later be converted into stock in companies. The voucher plan successfully privatized the economy, through returning ownership of most of the assets to the private. As of December 1994 more than 80 percent of firms in the Czech Republic were privatized or had decided on a privatization strategy. Business boomed in the capital of Prague and other cities in the mid-1990s as new companies were established by venturing entrepreneurs. The government also succeeded in reestablishing their economic connections with Western Europe as well as gaining a substantial amount of foreign economic aid. The Czech Republic has gained membership the The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Central European Free Trade Association. In October 1993 the country became an associate member of the European Union (EU), and in December 1997 the EU invited the notion of them becoming a full member. As a part of the EU's primary expansion of membership, the Czech Republic is expected to gain full affiliation within five to ten years. The unemployment level in the Czech Republic is at 9.0 percent as of 1999. The employed are distributed with: 54 percent in the area of service, 40 percent in manufacturing and industry, and 6 percent in agriculture, forestry, and fishing. The country has many trade unions which are tied together through the Czech-Moravian Chamber of Trade Unions, which was founded in 1990 with headquarters in Prague. These unions are expected to help further decrease the unemployment and work stability in Czech. Some 40 percent of land in the Czech Republic is cultivated. Due largely to a decline in state subsidies, the number of agricultural workers has weakened dramatically. The principal crops grown in the Czech Republic are barley, wheat, corn, rye, sugar beets, potatoes, flax, and hops. Czech farmers also raise sizable numbers of livestock animals, including poultry, pigs, cattle, and sheep. Now, agriculture plays a relatively small role in the nation's export industry. Pre-Communist Czechoslovakia was mainly a producer of light industrial goods, including textiles, footwear, porcelain, and glass. Communism removed the importance of these industries and replaced them with heavy industry, including metallurgy and mining. The principal mineral extracted in the Czech Republic is coal. Czechoslovakia became a producer of steel, machinery, and weapons from this industrial change. The post-Communist Czech Republic, though heavy industry continues to be important, has allowed for the reemergal of traditional industries. The principal products of the Czech Republic today are woven fabrics, paper, crude steel, pig iron, and footwear; cheese and beer are important processed foods. Due to limited resources, the Czech Republic must import the bulk of its energy supply. Gas and oil are supplied mainly by pipelines through Slovakia. In

Free Essays on Evil

Evil: Kinds of evil in our lives Step outside. Now look around you. Do you see or hear anything evil out there today? I did this, and I didn’t find anything that I would consider evil. Then, I sat down on my porch while my dad went out to start his truck. After a bit, gasoline consumed the area around me. The smell of gasoline has now occupied my porch and moving about the atmosphere. I realized that pollution is evil. Evil is everywhere around us. Pollution is just one example. There are more examples like pollution that most people don’t think of as evil, such as smoking. Evil is a messy project, defying simplistic solutions, or so we think. There is no single, universally satisfying answer to this dark reality. Often the only evil we observe is the result of sinful choices. But we have to remember that some evil we cannot observe. Pollution is an evil that burns holes in the ozone layer. We know there is a hole in the atmosphere but we do not observe pollution as being evil, we observe it as a fact of life. Along with pollution comes smoking. Smoking is definitely an evil, a very bad evil that effects us greatly, and it pollutes the air. Smoking is the number one women’s cancer killer. The evil in smoking is killing you, and it also kills the nonsmokers around you. Often when tragedy strikes, when evil rears its ugly head, people are found complaining. To complain is to express frustration, to acknowledge ignorance, to announce hurt. Some of the question that arises are, â€Å"Why would God allow such and such to happen? How can this be fair?† Nobody has the right answers to these questions. Maybe God wanted to put obstacles in our lives, maybe he wanted to test us to see what our strengths and weaknesses were. Well, obviously, many Americans have failed the smoking test. But are these complaints wrong? It depends on the attitude of the person who makes them. In one sense, yes. If the person ma... Free Essays on Evil Free Essays on Evil Evil: Kinds of evil in our lives Step outside. Now look around you. Do you see or hear anything evil out there today? I did this, and I didn’t find anything that I would consider evil. Then, I sat down on my porch while my dad went out to start his truck. After a bit, gasoline consumed the area around me. The smell of gasoline has now occupied my porch and moving about the atmosphere. I realized that pollution is evil. Evil is everywhere around us. Pollution is just one example. There are more examples like pollution that most people don’t think of as evil, such as smoking. Evil is a messy project, defying simplistic solutions, or so we think. There is no single, universally satisfying answer to this dark reality. Often the only evil we observe is the result of sinful choices. But we have to remember that some evil we cannot observe. Pollution is an evil that burns holes in the ozone layer. We know there is a hole in the atmosphere but we do not observe pollution as being evil, we observe it as a fact of life. Along with pollution comes smoking. Smoking is definitely an evil, a very bad evil that effects us greatly, and it pollutes the air. Smoking is the number one women’s cancer killer. The evil in smoking is killing you, and it also kills the nonsmokers around you. Often when tragedy strikes, when evil rears its ugly head, people are found complaining. To complain is to express frustration, to acknowledge ignorance, to announce hurt. Some of the question that arises are, â€Å"Why would God allow such and such to happen? How can this be fair?† Nobody has the right answers to these questions. Maybe God wanted to put obstacles in our lives, maybe he wanted to test us to see what our strengths and weaknesses were. Well, obviously, many Americans have failed the smoking test. But are these complaints wrong? It depends on the attitude of the person who makes them. In one sense, yes. If the person ma...