issue147[Jet小组]第九次作业

ellefrancaiUID: 2449693

TOPIC: ISSUE147 - "Tradition and modernization are incompatible. One must choose between them."
WORDS: 522

The assertion presented above set the point of view that tradition and modernization are incompatible so that people must make choice between them, which I quite disagree with since modernization is a long-run motion in the history and during the process of modernization, something changes into tradition while others dying away. It is the time makes the choice, not people in my opinion.

In fact, people know well about how to let modernization and tradition coexist with each other at the same time. To take festivals as examples, dragon boat festival of China was originated from a kind of legend of a famous poet named Qu Yuan. He was a patriot at his time and died for dropping into a river and drowned. People started this festival in order to memorize him and created a sort of traditional food, ZongZi which is glutinous rice wrapped with leaves, and set the rule to eat Zongzi at the festival. Today, Chinese still eat ZongZi as many people's favourite snack and keeps the tradition while they are getting used to fast food thrived recent years from western countries, such as KFC, McDonald, Burger King etc.. Moreover, Coco Cola, regarded as the symbol of the modern society by most people was accepted all over the world but people still keep their passion of coffee for westerns and tea for easterners, especially Chinese.

Furthermore, what we wear has changed a lot even we just look back for a short history, but people do wear their traditional cloths nowadays. The difference is that in some countries, people wear traditional cloths only in some formal or important occasions while others use them as daily wear. For instance, Korean and Japanese wear their country's traditional cloths on their wedding or during traditional festivals. Chinese people seldom wear traditional cloths called TangZhuang and QiPao, but on their weddings they will at least changed for one suit that is traditional cloths while brides and bridegrooms will also wear white wedding dress nowadays. And people got surprisingly accustomed for it although it has changed for just about 20 years.

Moreover, some customs were proved by time to be tradition and people never throw them beyond their minds, especially for some tradition mental virtue. Some classical literature like Lun Yu of Confucius told us much life philosophy, such as keeping optimistic to stay in poverty, as I paraphrased, and old sayings, for example, ‘no pains, no gains’. These fruit of ancient saints teaches us a lot and people remember them by pass from generation to generation. People do make some part of changes of some out-dated traditional views, such as females should learn little as a famous general idea in China.

In sum, elite of tradition will never be replaced in the process of modernization. However, some out-dated parts will disappear in the long-run. Traditions like high-lights, they are the elite of mankind and often have deep relationship with culture while modernization is the trend of world which is inevitable. It is time to extract tradition through the long-run of modernization, not people. They just learn to accept, follow, and protect their own traditions.