This is the first draft of my revised essay for the fall term of AP Lang. It is about how great America is. I visited Peru last summer so, there are many comparisons between America and Peru in the essay. I will post my final draft sou you can read both and see the differences between the two, and believe me, there are a lot of them.
America
Some of us fail to realize how lucky we are. We take the simplest things for granted. We do not take a moment to stop what we are doing and appreciate our fortunes. Our way of life is exclusive. No one else in the world lives in such luxury as we do.
Last summer I was lucky enough to go on a trip to Peru. My expectations were not high, but I was not prepared for what I saw. After living in the United States for all my life, I came to the understanding that this is what the world is like. I believed everyone had a school, a home, a hospital, even clean drinking water. This in fact was nowhere near the case. Peru is a third-world country. The people there have simple pleasures.
On the other side of the equator, we live in the utmost comfort. We have cars, lavish homes, cell phones. Outside of the big cities, it was difficult to find the most common of things in the United States. For example, there were no toilets in small villages; there were simply holes in the ground. It is simple things like this that we take for granted.
Because we a lucky enough to live in one of the best countries in the world, I feel we should embrace what makes it so excellent. First and foremost are probably our rights. We have an extreme number of freedoms compared to a lot of other countries. In North Korea, individual freedoms are severely reduced when put side by side to those of Americans. Another thing the United States holds above all others is our fulsome standard of living. In Peru, nearly everyone walked from place to place. Here almost everyone has car for commuting. This and the home are the staple of American wealth. Extravagant homes are probably the single most distinctive trait of American prosperity. We are blessed with solid constructions with ever amenity you could think of. Multi bathroom houses are almost unheard of in Peru. For the few with cars in Peru, almost none keep their cars in a garage. We have a solid roof over our heads that cost thousands of dollars. In Peru, they have thatch and corrugated tin roofs. There houses are made out of adobe, basically mud houses, and even then they are usually only one room.
It’s obvious that we live a luxuries life style. The tallest building that I saw in Lima, the Nation’s capital was probably no taller than the Alliant Energy Building in downtown Cedar Rapids. For these things we must be thankful for. We truly don’t understand how fortunate we are until we have a chance to visit and immerse ourselves in a different culture. And even though we have our own share of problems, we are still much better off than much of the rest of the world.
Word Count: 551
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