Textual Analysis on the book of The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Research Paper - 1

Textual Analysis on the book of The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - Research Paper Example Many critics claim that dystopian novels set in the future are not really about the author’s idea of the future, but instead are deliberately exaggerated stories about what the author thinks is wrong with the world of his or her present. With this in mind, it is easy to see that Butler was writing not about the year 2024, but about the year 1993. In The Parable of the Sower, it’s easy to see the fears and problems represented that were prevalent in American society in the early 1990s. Huge corporations exploiting increasingly powerless workers, an epidemic of crack addiction among the inner-city poor, race riots triggered by police brutality, and a new public discourse about rape dominated the news of the day. Crime—particularly violent inner-city crime and gang-related crime—had been extremely high in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The change that the main character, Lauren, preaches about is really the change that Octavia Butler wished to see in her own society. The basis for the Earthseed philosophy that Lauren tries to spread is that the only god is change, and people can create the change they want to see if they understand that they are able to do it. The people who don’t know they can create change, or those who fear change, will eventually become victims of it. In Lauren’s world, the problems of the late twentieth century United States have grown so severe that they make life essentially unlivable for impoverished people. Problems that were once thought of as only urban issues have moved out into rural areas. It’s the extreme nature of these problems that forces the change to happen. If Lauren had lived in a slightly safer or more stable situation; if she had been able to stay safely in her home, or if she’d had a loving family alive to keep her there, she would never have tried to travel north and gather followers for her new religion. Instead she might have lived quietly and never shared her ideas with

Reasonable expectation of privacy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Reasonable expectation of privacy - Essay Example It is also the starting point of analysis in determining whether or not a violation of the Fourth Amendment has occurred (Jones, 1997). The Constitutional principle reposed in the Fourth Amendment that protects the right to privacy of a citizen against unreasonable searches and seizures is triggered when (1) the citizen has a manifested subjective expectation of privacy, (2) and one that society is willing to accept as objectively reasonable. California v. Greenwood (486 U.S. 35 [1988]). However, the Supreme Court has come up with a long line of cases carving out exceptions to the rule and stating the circumstances where no search occurred as there is no violation of reasonable expectation of privacy. One of the first circumstances is that of â€Å"false friends†. This is embodied in the case of Hoffa v. United States (385 U.S. 293 [1966]), where the defendant had made some disclosures to a person he thought to be a union official, but was in fact a government agent. Hoffa claimed that it was an illegal search and claimed his reasonable expectation of privacy. The argument did not hold, however, as the Supreme Court found that the government agent â€Å"was in the suite by invitation and every conversation which he heard was either directed to him or knowingly carried on in his presence.† (page 302). The second circumstance given by the Supreme Court is abandoned property, meaning that there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy where the evidence has been dumped in a public place and law enforcement agents have managed to retrieve it. A good example is a gun that has been thrown in a garbage bin, and thus leaving it exposed to the general public or to a definite third party. That evidence can be rightly used against him. The third circumstance is physical attributes on display. The courts have held that there cannot possibly be an expectation of privacy when what is sought to be excluded as evidence is physical characteristics that