Rodrigo Ramirez Ramirez itibaren Edworth, Biggleswade, Central Bedfordshire SG18, UK itibaren Edworth, Biggleswade, Central Bedfordshire SG18, UK

For many Americans, the Pledge of Allegiance is the quintessential childhood reflex. It is the ritual that began each school day, simultaneously unthinking and sacred, like all liturgies. Most schoolchildren stand up and place hand over heart without a second thought. Surely the Pledge is an indisputable Ur-text scratched out on the back of some Founding Father’s dinner napkin. Or more likely, the pious architects of democracy found it in their Bibles, right after the part where Jesus denounces Obamacare. Read more...

This is another book that I was assigned to read in school. It is George Orwell's memoirs about struggling to get by while he lived in Paris in London. This book is just fascinating. Orwell works in a hotel kitchen I believe and some other low-wage odd jobs for which the working-conditions were just horrendous. His reflections on poverty are interesting and I think anyone would be surprised to learn that one of the greatest writers of the 20th century was once a homeless man. One of my favorite quotes from the books is this: "And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."