Outside reading post #3

John Hockenberry in his novel, Moving Violations, learns the importance of bravery, especially when you are disabled, in order to make it through life. Hockenberry's grandfather lost his arm when he was young and suffered from limited abilities and was also made fun of by many people. However, his grandfather didn't complain once. Hockenberry notes, "Tom Hockenberry's trials and his quiet acceptance of fate was seen as a supreme virtue by his son, my father. The sacrament of that virtue was to never speak of those things" (66-67). Though his bravery was not noticed by most people, Tom Hockenberry's entire family saw and admired his gallentry. Unfortunately, John Hockenberry became disabled after his grandfather passed away, and he often wished he had his grandfather was there to give him advice. He asked his grandmother, one day, what advice his grandfather would have given him, and she confidently answered, "'He'd want you to, you know, be proud and brave and everything else. Because you have to be. You have to push. If you don't push, you're not going to get anywhere'" (68). Although it seemed to many people that Tom and John Hockenberry's lives were destroyed because of their diabilities, but both of them learned how to be brave and how to do everyday tasks and more. Of course this kind of bravery does not only apply to people with disabilities. Everyone must demonstrate tremendous courage and perserverance to get through any difficulties and find a way to succeed despite life's seemingly impenetrable boundaries.

Outside Reading Post #2

The book I am reading, Moving Violations by John Hockenberry, is a memoir of Hockenberry's life as a paraplegic journalist in which he learns that you've got to keep people in your life not because they are useful or convenient, but because you love them. After his car accident, Hockenberry can no longer feel or use his legs. To his body, they are just purposeless objects that use body heat and blood without compensating for them with services that legs are supposed to perform. He was advised by many people to simply amputate them and get them out of the way. Even though he sees the logic in this suggestion, he finds that he can't let go of his legs and says, "The truth is, I love my legs, not for what they can do for me anymore, but simply because they are my legs" (48). The attachment to his legs is so strong that Hockenberry is unable to just get rid of them. This is not because they make his life convenient- they actually make it more difficult- but he feels a connection to them because they are his. Hockenberry compares his sensless legs to his uncle, who is mentally retarded. His uncle developed a rare disease when he was very young that caused him to lose his senses, and his family abandoned him to a home, never to see him again. Hockenberry marvels at how his uncle's parents could have exiled him in such a way, "...[his] exile from his family and me was unfathomable. For reasons that will perhaps never be fully understood, a few years after he was sent away my uncle was so nearly erased, his existence denied by the family that had brought him into the world" (55). Hockenberry can't imagine why his grandparents would've discarded their sensless son as he was told to do to his with his legs. Hockenberry knows that family love isn't a matter of convenience, it is the fact that family members are all part of each other as much as his legs are a part of him.

Moving Violations

Gravity affects us all. It does not discriminate based on age, gender, race, or morality. We are all bound by its power and can do nothing to reverse it, so it is with the world. In John Huckenberry's memoir Moving Violations, he sees how the unstoppable forces of life afflict all people, and they cannot be resisted by an individual or by a nation. Hockenberry is an American journalist whose legs were paralyzed at the age of nineteen in a tragic car accident. When he recalls the incident in his book, he remembers the feeling of weakness and helplessness as was being thrown by gravity in a speeding metal machine and off the road. He compares the will of nature to wolves: "The wolves in my imagination didn't care if I was a good boy or about any of the other little-kid cliffhangers of grades and chores and the judgments of grown-ups. A wolf would presumably find me just as nutritious if I said my please's and thank you's as if I had omitted them" (19). Basically, he is saying that nothing about who he was or what he did could've prevented him from being in the accident. Not only does gravity overpower people as individuals but also as a nation. The book opens with Hockenberry in the Middle East among the Kurdish refugees, and one of the Kurds after learning of his disability demands, "'They send you to us. You who cannot stand? You are American, what is America now? Why are you here?' ...To him my presence was an unsightly metaphor of America itself: able to arrive but unable to stand" (7). He and the refugee both recognize that as much as America would love to think that they are in control of the problems plaguing people all over the world, there are places their arms simply can't reach. The power of gravity will always surpass them. Throughout history, man has always tried to conquor the universe. They experiment with new philosophies, innovations, and lifestyles, but mankind will never have complete control. We are all at the mercy of the power of gravity.