Josh Harper
Eng 213
11/04/05

 2.)  Growing up in Amman Jordan, I was faced with individuals that thought they knew best for me almost everyday.  I was constantly being told how I should dress and act by the local people.  They thought the best way was their way, and they were not very opened to other cultures or ways of thinking other than their own.  I was often looked at funny and sometimes made fun of simply because I had white skin and dressed in American clothes.  The situation that I went through and the South’s situation during the Civil War do somewhat correspond in some aspects.  One way they correspond, is that the South was being forced to change their entire way of life.  The North changing the South’s way of living is much like the Arab people of Jordan trying to make me change the way I dressed and looked.  In both situations, the person or side trying to make the change knows very little about the other and is changing them simply because they are different from them.  Chesnut makes comment that the northerners were “educated in northern schools” (1085), and that “they have the same ideas of right and wrong (as each other)” (1085).  Therefore they only know what is good for them.  This is the same as the situation I had to go through.  The people only knew their way of life, so the ridiculed anything different.  I resented the fact that the people were not accepting much like the people of the South did not like the way the Northern people were trying to make them change.