Women in Oppressive Islamic States

Jake Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 102

7/27/2010

The theme I find the most important in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is the open oppression of women in society. The reason I think this is so important is because similar situations have happened throughout history and are happening in places around the world today. The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale is governed by an falsely altruistic but truly misogynistic right-wing religious party. While the measures taken to control women in The Handmaid’s Tale are more extreme than they are in any actual culture, there are cultures out there that make an effort to control many aspects of women’s lives in their states. The Handmaid’s Tale is in a way, a response to a fear of change in these oppressive states. Only, instead of a change for the better, the fear is that conditions could become worse if nobody cares enough to make them better.

While some Islamic states have feminist movements and women have gained more freedom than they ever had before, radical Islamist groups are trying to push them back. Two places that discriminate against women are Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Both of these places have radical Islamist groups in place such as the Taliban. In Afghanistan, “an overwhelming number of women are illiterate. More than half of all brides are under 16, and one woman dies in childbirth every half hour. Domestic violence is so common that 87 per cent of women admit to experiencing it”. (Olivia Ward, Ten Worst Countries for Women.) In Saudia Arabia, “women are systemically marginalized, forced to veil themselves, may not go out without a guardian or work in public places. Women become detainees in their husbands’ homes.”. (Munir, Islamic Fundamentalism and its Effect on Women). In The Handmaid’s Tale, most women are forbidden to read and write. The handmaids are not allowed to go out on their own or even to where they want to go, “Why would we want to go from here to there? We would be up to no good and they would know it.” (Atwood 31). Even when Offred walks to the market, she must dress so that she is covered up, and must keep her head bowed down. This is the modest thing to do.

In many traditional Islamic societies, women are made to wear the burqa in public, or even in their house if there is a man around. The burqa is similar to the handmaid’s outfit, except the only opening is a slit for the eyes. The Taliban took to even more extreme measures, “In February 1998, religious police forced all women off the streets of Kabul and issued new regulations ordering people to blacken their windows, so that women would not be visible from the outside” (Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban). To me as an American and a westerner in general, these restrictions on women’s liberties are shocking.

Some Muslim women have spoken out against radical Islamist groups trying to control women. Other women have been beaten or killed for daring to speak out against prevailing authorites. Verse 4:34 of the Quran reads in part “Those [women] whose nushuz (disobedience) you fear, admonish them, and abandon them in bed, and strike them. If they obey you, do not pursue a strategy against them. Indeed, God is Exalted, Great" (Quran 3:34). According to the Quran, if a woman disobeys, you may strike them. This reminded me of Moira’s beating in The Handmaid’s Tale, when she tried to escape from the Red Center. She disobeyed by trying to escape, and in return they caught her and beat her, “It was the feet they’d do, for a first offense. They used steel cables, frayed at the end” (Atwood 91). This is yet another practice held in common with radical Islam. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday commonly prescribes “falaqa”, or foot whipping on people who displeased him (Uday Foot Torture, Youtube).

The women in the Red Center in The Handmaid’s Tale were there to be groomed to believe certain things, look and act a certain way and learn that there are consequences for speaking up. The women are there to be brainwashed. From a western perspective it seems like this is what must have happened to the Muslim women who claim pride in the restrictive orders imposed on them by their religion. One woman named Oumkheyr speaks of this pride in an eerily Gileadean fashion, “I wear the burqa for the simple reason that I am a Muslim and the Koran says that I must wear the full veil in order to be modest. I am proud of my Muslim faith and my modesty. I am proud to follow God's law” (Why I’m Proud to Wear the Burqa, CNN).

In Gilead, the strict new measures imposed on women stem from a religious group who interpreted the teachings of their faith in a most extreme way. As Aunt Lydia tells the women in the Red Center, “Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary” (Atwood 11). Through time, her hope was that the women will forget their former freedoms, and that their offspring will never know them and therefore will not miss them. They will be taught to feel shame when they think thoughts that are not sanctioned by the people in charge. This seems like what may have happened in Islamic societies. Women who stand up for these things do so because it is what they know. Many women in western societies see the burqa as a sign of oppression, and many women in Islamic societies hold the opposite view. They see it a liberating and spiritual symbol, proud to wear it because they are pleasing their God. Traditional Muslim women in more open, western societies often feel shame as well. When they get a job and are required to conform to a dress code, they may experience “emotional responses of guilt, shame, and embarrassment that in turn trigger complex emotional responses.” (Research on Emotion in Organizations xxi)

These controls and even acceptance of these restrictions happens frequently when a religion has major control over the population and the society itself. Women who are proud to be Muslim and follow Islam’s strict laws may do so only because it is designated by their God and their religion. It is harder to reject an idea if it is a main tenet of one’s religion. If a person does so they face discrimination, punishment and exile. This is why I believe it is a detrimental thing for society to be governed by a religion. As we have seen throughout history, while religious texts may not change, the people in charge who interpret their meanings do. Any writing is open to interpretation, and oppressive regimes try to find a way to relate their agendas to a part of their scripture. If they can do this, they are allowed to pass unjust laws that betray the meaning of religions, while using quotes from religious texts as the pretext for their tyranny.

I do believe that the women’s world of Islam does need reformation, but we must be careful how we go about it. Trying to force democracy and freedom of choice is not the way to implement freedom. We must get Muslim women to speak openly, hear their views both pro-veil and against. We must not act superior or denote them as stone-age thinkers, but learn to respect their views. If we can learn to respect what they have to say, they may do the same to us, and then progress can begin to be made. A Muslim woman named Fatima Gailani is prepared to fight for this progress. There is a quote of hers in Jan Goodwin’s book Price of Honor, “It is time for Islamic women, the majority of whom are moderate, to take a stand. But to do that, we need to have a thorough knowledge of our religion” (78).

Sources

Ward, Olivia. "Ten Worst Countries for Women." Thestar.com. 8 Mar. 2008. Web. 26 July 2010. .

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Print.

"Research on Emotion in Organizations." Research on Emotion in Organizations, Volume 4 : Emotions, Ethics and Decision-making 4 (2008): Xxi.

Munir, Lily Zakiyah. "ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM AND ITS IMPACT ON WOMEN." Emory.edu. Web. 29 July 2010. .

Uday Foot Torture. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 16 Mar. 2009. Web. 28 July 2010. .

Oumkheyr. "Opinion: Why I'm Proud to Wear the Burqa - CNN.com." CNN.com. 4 Feb. 2010. Web. 27 July 2010. http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/02/04/france.burqa.ban/index.html>.

Goodwin, Jan. Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Print.



Quran. 4:34. < http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/Pages/adifficultverse.html>

The Effects of Civilian Deaths in Iraq

Jake Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 102

7/23/2010

The Effects of Civilian Deaths in Iraq

Like most wars , the Iraq War takes a toll on the psyche’s of our soldiers. I use the present tense because the horror and suffering never ends after the war. Many come home with a sense of guilt for the things they did and saw in Iraq. Sean Huze’s The Sand Storm is a brilliant story which makes the reader feel the guilt and shame of the soldiers. Is also makes the reader have their own internal struggle alongside the soldiers, trying to justify their actions. Trying to make an excuse. One such part is during LCPL Dodd’s monologue, when he is talking about having killed numerous civilians, “Fuck ‘em. What the hell were they doing in a war zone anyways?” (Huze 3). I think of SGT Casavecchia as the conscience of these men throughout their monologues. He gives LCPL Dodd the answer he already knows, but doesn’t want to tell himself, “I think they lived there” (Huze 3). It is easier for LCPL Dodd to use his excuse that they were in a war zone, than to accept the reality that they invaded neighborhoods, not military grounds or “war zones”.

Many soldiers have experiences like this, and come home to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or other serious mental health problems. According to a study by the the American Medical Associaton, “Thirty-Five percent of Iraq war veterans accessed mental health services in the year after returning home”, and according to the New England Journal of Medicine, 15.6 to 17.1 % of Iraq war veterans “met the criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety, or PTSD” (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-quarterly/V20N1.pdf, pg 4).

A large part of this was not so much troops seeing their comrades fall beside them, though that certainly did happen and must account for some trauma. A large part of the issues these troops have returning home is dealing with having seen large numbers of innocent men, women and children massacred. For some it is not from what they saw, but what they did, who they killed and for what reasons.

The total death count of American soldiers dead from the Iraq war as of February 6, 2010 was 4,365. I have found it hard to find information on how many Iraqi soldiers or “enemy combatants” have been killed. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the invasion of Iraq said , “We don’t do body counts” (http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf, pg 16). This could be a reason why it is so hard to find an answer to this question. I have however found a 2008 Report for Congress that inquires into the number of civilian deaths in Iraq. The report consists of six separate sources with their own numbers, but the average number is 172,091 Iraqi civilian deaths from the start of the war in 2003 to August 27, 2008 (http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/110395.pdf, pg 19).

With most sources places the Iraqi civilian death toll over 100,000, it is no wonder many of our soldiers come home with mental health issues. While our troops were not drafted to war, many did not want to be there in the first place. Just as with the Vietnam war, many soldiers were morally opposed to “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Like Huze writes about SSGT Adams, “he wasn’t fighting for the red, white & blue, He just knew the road home went through Baghdad” (Huze 19).

Many of the soldiers cannot be held completely responsible for their actions. As much as it may sound like the trials at Nuremburg, they were just following orders. The real responsibility needs to lie with the policy makers of our country and every one of us American citizens. We need to remember that we don’t just send people to fight and die for us, we send people to fight and kill for us. When we do that, especially today with the extremely devastating weapons we have at our disposal, we need to think about who it will effect. It will leave a resentment towards our people from nations overseas, and a resentment from our troops who return home and wonder why we sent them to do such things.

The stories in The Sand Storm do a good job of making you feel for the soldiers, as well as making you look at the way civilian casualties are played out while in Iraq at war. To further this understanding, one must look at the facts and the numbers that represent real people. The major media does not do a good enough job of portraying the costs of war, not only for our soldiers who may live with nightmares the rest of their lives, but for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people who will undoubtedly have similar if not even worse mental issues.

Sources

Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front. 3, 19. Screenplay. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004.

Hoge, C. W., and J. L. Auchterlonie. "Mental Health Problems, Use of Mental Services, and Attrition from Military Service after Returning from Iraq or Afghanistan." Journal of the American Medical Association: 295, 1023. Http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-quarterly/V20N1.pdf. 5 Apr. 2009. Web. 20 July 2010. .



Burnham, Gilbert, Shannon Doocy, Elizabeth Dzeng, Ridyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts. "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq." Human Cost of the War in Iraq: 16. Http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf. Center for International Studied, Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusettes, 13 Oct. 2006. Web. 20 July 2010. .

Leland, Anne, and Mari-Jana "M-J" Oboroceanu. "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics." American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics (2010): 19. Http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/139347.pdf. Congressional Research Service, 26 Feb. 2010. Web. 20 July 2010. .

Img URL: http://www.thelastminuteblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/bush-faces-of-the-dead-large.jpg

Research Proposal

Jake Stryker


Laura Darrow/Eng 102

7/16/10

Essay topic proposal

I am going to compare the roles of women in three 20th century dystopian novels: Atwood’ The Handmaid’s Tale , Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. There are three female protagonists between the books, and they all have their differences. This is due to the different natures of the separate dystopian societies, and therefore must be a byproduct of the times the writers came from. I will do research on the world events around the times each novel was written.

By researching actual historical events I believe I can better understand why Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, and why Huxley and Orwell wrote their dystopian literature as well. I should be able to find out by looking at significant world events and the powerful societies of the age why the roles of women in the novels are such a way. The 20th century was full of writers who must have had a worry about terrible times lying ahead, and I want to know why, and how that contributed to their envisioned dystopias. Margaret Atwood is the only female writer of the three, and that may have something to do with the differences between the role of women in the three novels.



1984

Brave New World

The Handmaid's Tale

Mid-Session Check-in Blog

Jacob Stryker

Mid-Session Check-in Blog

7/9/2010

I have enjoyed taking this class, it is going better for me than my Eng 101 online. There are some things that I don’t find necessary, such as using a webcam and making a blog. I don’t see a point to the blog: We turn our assignments in through blackboard anyways, and nobody responds to other people’s blog. That is just my style though, I prefer a more straightforward way of learning. I don’t feel that I need to do these new things, I would rather be told what assignments I need to do and do them.

With that out of the way, I can say that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Tim O’Brien’s and Sean Huze’s work. My plan in life is to go into law and/or politics, and I feel like if more politicians would read things similar to these men’s work they would not be so willing to commit our country and our young men and women to war. I have not found The Handmaid’s Tale to be as interesting. I am still in the beginning though, so it may end up getting better. Overall the reading material has been interesting, and I am glad I had the opportunity to read the works in class, since I probably wouldn’t have ever heard of these writings otherwise.

I feel like the biggest issue with my writing is using correct MLA style all the time. I cannot remember off the top of my head how to put things in the correct format, so normally I have to go back to the examples in the Week 2 Assignments folder. I have tried using a couple different internet sites for MLA citation, but even there I have gotten different answers. It probably confuses me so much because I don’t see MLA citation a whole lot. Sites all over the internet use different ways to mark their sources, and some are similar but slightly different.

If I have any goals for the rest of the semester I would say I’d like to get MLA citation down as well as proofreading my own work. I don’t think there are too many grammatical errors in my writing, but I’m sure there are parts where it could sound better if rewritten in a more engaging way. Overall I just want to end up with a good grade here, while picking up some tools for the rest of my college career.

Essay 2

Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 201: Essay 2

2 July 2010

I want to compare CPL Waters monologue from The Sand Storm and a part of “How to Tell a True War Story” from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The situations in these two stories are surely different from almost every outside look. Thirty-plus years apart and in completely different parts of the world, yet they are the same. The similarities come from the internal pain and suffering that the soldiers go through and their inability to deal with it.

In both of these stories there are young men who have been thrust into infernos of mortar and gun fire. They had come together with their fellow soldiers only to have them killed before their eyes. Coming from a society where violence is really not extremely rampant, these men did not have a very high threshold for witnessing and committing brutal acts. Because of this inability to process seeing death, both men built up rage.

CPL Waters grew to loathe the enemy, and with that comes a sort of base racism. He began to think of everybody there as an enemy, because they don’t wear uniforms, they don’t conform to rules of war, and will use civilian areas as places to launch attacks. Waters was sitting on the truck eating his lunch when he saw, “a pile of half a dozen rags” with “one still alive and kicking. Well, maybe not kicking” (Huze 8). The man was not kicking because both of his legs were blown off. In normal places, what Waters did then is unimaginable. He laughed and hopped off the truck to walk up to the suffering “rag”. All Waters wanted at that moment was to kill this man. He was just another scumbag that had a hand in the demise of his fellow marines. This is not the roughest part of the story. When the man silently pleads for Waters to shoot him, Waters changed his mind and at the same time got a sick thrill out of it. He took on the role of a sadist, sitting there watching this man slowly bleed to death while he continued eating his lunch.

In The Things They Carried, Rat Kiley loses himself in a much more physically extreme way, but I would argue that it is more mentally extreme to eat lunch while watching somebody bleed out. In “How to Tell a True War Story” Tim O’Brien tells about Curt Lemon dying. The lining behind the story of his death is Rat Kiley’s reaction to it. They were apparently best friends, and while nobody was directly responsible for Lemon’s death (meaning he was not shot by an enemy you can see, an enemy you can shoot back), but he stepped on a I.E.D, “He was playing with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead” (O’Brien 78). A cold booby trapped explosive planted in the ground killed his friend, there was nobody to place the blame on at the time. Rat Kiley didn’t have an enemy to watch writhe and squirm in pain waiting for their death. Rat Kiley had a baby water buffalo. He took his gun out, pointed it at the baby water buffalo and started shooting. As O’Brien pointed out, “it wasn’t to kill, it was to hurt” (O’Brien 78-79). He shot it over and over, and everybody sat there staring, not saying a word. He blew off parts of the buffalo’s body, his leg, ear, mouth. By the end Kiley was crying, and to be honest, so was I. I missed Curt Lemon. I didn’t want to kill the buffalo, but I had to. Once I started I couldn’t stop and the release felt good. O’Brien does a damn good job of putting you behind the skin of his characters.

Both of these men could be said to have had serious mental breakdowns. In CPL Waters case I found it much more chilling than I found it saddening. Here was Waters, fighting a War on Terror, and yet he sits there and does the same thing back. He terrorized that dying Iraqi man by being so cold towards him, by showing no mercy but staring directly at him. I can imagine he cocked his head to the side, like a curious dog, and gave a quick smile. That is terror to me.

In Rat Kiley’s case however, it wasn’t a desire to terrorize something or somebody. It was depression and helplessness. A frustration at not being able to express his feelings to anybody else in his company. Maybe he felt like he wanted to talk to Lemon about it, but then gets even more hurt remembering that he won’t be able to again.

You can see that these two situations and two ways of coping with it are completely different, but it is the same thing they both felt. They were scared, helpless and we cannot forget, young. While they dealt with their issues in different ways, they are the same problems that countless other soldiers will end up facing, and then there will be countless stories told about how they coped with it. Both of these writers are aiming for the same goal, they want to get people informed about the war. They want people to stop saying “support our troops” and actually start doing it. They want to rid society of the stigma that faces soldiers when they openly speak out against government war policy. It seems like they aim to put people into war, without ever having them enlist in the Armed Forces. By that, I mean that they do such a good job of relating their experience, they truly make you feel what they are describing, and so in a way you get to go to war without ever having to.









Works Cited

O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. 1990. 2 July 2010. Print.


Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004. Print.

Operation Homecoming

Stryker

Laura Darrow

Eng 102

2 July 2010

I was pleased that we had an assignment available about Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. I had watched this only a month or two prior to taking this class during a time in which I watched a lot of war documentaries. First watching Operation Homecoming I was surprised at the movie’s style. It is a series of poems and writing from soldiers and their families, yet it plays similarly to a documentary. When you get to hear the words read to you and see the images put alongside the poems, memoirs, letters and essays, it makes the experiences seem much more real and true.

I feel like there are elements from both Tim O’Brien’s and Sean Huze’s styles in the movie. Of course it is hard to relate other peoples writing’s to one of theirs. I feel like these soldiers who have written their stories each have their own style because they all had their own experiences. Even if two men were at the same place at the same time, a foot away from each other looking at the same thing, they will retell that experience differently. Things don’t get recorded by what you see, rather your thought process and mental state also affect how you will perceive things.

Some of the writers such as Sangjoon Han seem to have a more O’Brien approach to writing. He wants to get the truest story out, and to do so he cannot make it one true story. He says it is a story he has heard from many soldiers, so to make it true for all of them, he couldn’t make it true for only one. While O’Brien brings a deep and personal emotion to his writing, Huze uses raw emotion, not trying to glam it up. I feel like “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell can be compared to Huze’s style of writing. In the story the character tends to think freely, and the story is brutally unglamorous. Nothing extraordinary about it, just getting shot at and being an inch from death, being scared out of his mind. One thing that is similar to Huze’s story in “Men in Black” is when he sees people he believes to be civilians and asks his squad leader what to do. “Just fuckin’ shoot ‘em! These people have no fuckin’ business out on the street whatsoever!”. While the gunner did not shoot to kill, in Huze’s play there is a situation that is related. LCPL Dodd describes the action from earlier that day, “Yeah, there’d been some ‘collateral damage’. That’s the nice way of saying we killed a bunch of civilians. Fuck ‘em. What the hell were they doing in war zone anyways?” (Huze 3).

One old veteran who is a commentator on the film says that at first it was different, but then war is still always war. Today’s war is all volunteers, whereas in past wars there was a draft instated. After reflecting for a moment the man said, “but I suppose it’s all the same once you get there”. Several of the stories talk about the pain soldiers come back with from killing civilians while at war. When you are here in America, and you hear that a group of marines killed 100 civilians, most are outraged, pissed off at the troops. Then of course there’s the gung-ho people who would have us just bomb everybody if it gets the few we are after. After reading Huze’s play and watching this movie, among other things, I still must say that I am disgusted by a lot of the slaughter that takes place there. But once you hear these stories, you know that they are just as disgusted, and it is worse for them because they are the ones who committed the acts. While still being angered by stories of civilians and journalists being killed, I can begin to empathize with some of the soldiers.



Works Cited

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Robbins, Richard. The Documentary Group.

Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm. NY: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, Jan 2004. Pg 3.

How Right can be so Wrong

Tim O’Brien’s “Across the Rainy River” is a tale of compassion and shame. A story of never ceasing guilt. More so than some other chapters in his book The Things They Carried, O’Brien looks to bring his dilemma to readers on an extremely personal level. During that summer of his life and his time spent at Tip Top Lodge, he endured a most extreme reflection of society and self. From the time he got drafted for the Viet Nam war, he knew he had the choice to flee, but he also knew that he never would.
At first through his writing, you gather that he was afraid and ashamed of being a coward. Being a coward in this case meant wriggling out of the draft, finding some way not to go to war, “I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure.” (O’Brien 45). He feared of how the old folks at his local café would talk about the “young O’Brien kid, how the damn sissy took off for Canada” (O’Brien 45). The common American view is that draft dodgers are yellow bellied cowards. Perhaps older people resort to ridiculing these so called “sissies” because they resent the wars in their own pasts. Perhaps ignorant people belittle these “cowards” because they don’t know what war is like, or the quiet don’t speak up about it because they cannot or are afraid to express their thoughts.
O’Brien expresses his own definition of cowardice towards the end. He felt guilt and shame before, thinking about doing what he believed was right and not joining the Viet Nam war. However, because he did what is socially considered to be the correct and brave thing by going to Viet Nam, he has had to live with a separate guilt every day. “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war.” (O’Brien 61). His shame lies with him “going with the grain”, following the leader, peer pressure. Going to war didn’t change his mind that the war was wrong, it just made him feel worse that he didn’t follow his heart, didn’t follow reason, and wasn’t brave.

O’Brien, Tim. “Across the Rainy River.” The Things They Carried. 1990. 22 June 2010. Print.

Image URL: http://www.vietnamgear.com/fullphoto.aspx?img=173rd_warzoneD.jpg

Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Immigrants in Our Own Land"

I chose this poem because I live in Arizona, and as the entire county knows, Arizona has recently passed the most radical immigration bill in America. I do not agree with the bill, and find it hard to believe it could pass in the first place. Some radicals have even proposed that children born to illegal immigrants in the United States should not be considered American citizens. This proposal is a direct violation of the 14th amendment to the Constitution, and it is amazing to hear our government officials acting like such ignorant buffoons.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio runs his mouth about having had a couple of policemen killed by illegal immigrants, and claims that is one reason he is so tough on illegals. This is ridiculous to say, because many more police get killed by legal citizens each year. His approach to law enforcement shows that he is indeed racist. He spends more time worrying about crimes that might happen with illegal Mexican immigrants than worrying about crimes being committed by other races.

I believe Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Immigrants in Our Own Land” is a plea to American citizens to stop being so prejudice, even if they don’t realize they are. He talks about how the immigrant comes to America with a head full of dreams, promised the opportunities they were never afforded in their home country. Unfortunately those dreams don’t often manifest in reality. The message he is shouting is an imploration to try to make the system better: We are a country of immigrants, and though it has only been a couple hundred years, the majority of Americans seem to have forgotten that. They seem to think they have more of a right to live here than others. I don’t like this view, and would like more people to remember the words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Lady Liberty welcomes the old and broken down, the young and poverty stricken. Nobody is denied their liberty.

As in the life he describes, Baca’s poem seems to progressively become less hopeful and more cynical. The first lines of the poem read “We are born with dreams in our hearts/looking for better days ahead” (lines 1-2). Even while some Americans may still think this is the land of opportunity, a quick look around will tell you that is not as true as you may think. It is not only immigrants that have a hard time in today’s society, though they do have it harder than typical citizens. There are many cases where you must be born into wealth in order to accumulate it. In this country’s past, men could reach the top if they had good ideas and were willing to sweat and bleed a bit to see them get achieved. This is hardly the case anymore, the wealth in this country is controlled by monopolies. Every major industry is monopolized now, which makes it extremely hard for new blood to come in and make a profit.

In the second stanza he describes the expectations the immigrant has, and the consternation he feels when he sees his fellows, “The old men who have lived here stare at us/from deep disturbed eyes, sulking, retreated” (Baca lines 16-17). This is the first sign of deception they see. They were told they would be able to finish school, learn a trade of their own, “But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers/to work in fields for three cents an hour” (Baca lines 24-25). They are told that this is not how it will always be, but taking a look around at those old men with sulking, disturbed eyes tells them otherwise. Yet they go about their work, clinging to the hope that life will eventually get better.

Immigrants who came from countries with brutal dictators cannot escape the men “who wore blue suits and broke our doors down/when they wanted, arrested us when they felt like/swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased” (Baca lines 35-37). This is the situation we will be facing in Arizona soon if it is not already happening. Jan Brewer claims that this bill is written as to not permit racial profiling, but there is no way it can be enforced without racial profiling. Even if it could, and the bill were written in such a way as to not allow any racism, who in their right minds thinks that the police always follow the law? Police do not have to follow the law, they can break it and it does not matter unless the accused goes to court to fight the charges, and even then, the citizen has to spend his precious time and money fighting the people who are supposed to protect and serve them only to see a cop get a slap on the wrist if anything at all. Police are not perfect beings, there are constant complains of police corruption. Who is to say that a policeman could not be racist, and is now given more of a right to legally harass the targets of their prejudice?

I believe we really need to do something about the way we accept citizens into the U.S. and how we treat these people. It has not been too long since full integration in the United States, and while seeds of hate do and likely always will remain and grow, the country has improved greatly in the last fifty years. Many people have no problems sitting next to a black person, African-American culture has greatly influenced today’s generation of children, and we are seeing in the young children the least racism ever experienced. Children today are growing up in a melting pot, realizing that people are all just the same, no matter the color of their skin. We need more adults to realize this, and try to put themselves into an immigrants shoes before saying the shoes are too comfortable.





Baca, Jimmy Santiago. “Immigrants in Our Own Land.” New Directions Publishing Corporation. 1990. June 18, 2010. Web. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179708

Sam Hamill’s "The Necessity to Speak"

I enjoyed reading Sam Hamill’s The Necessity to Speak. I find his outtake on writing similar to mine, and much less snobby that other critics. He understands that writing poetry is to make somebody feel something, to put the reader in the position of the writer. He understands that poetry does not need to rhyme or have rhythm, does not need to be written in a certain way in order to be captivating.


A repeating theme from the paper is the claim that as humans, “We can’t bear very much reality” (Hamill 547). I feel this is a product of how we are raised and what we are taught to believe at young ages. I think that if people were taught to question beliefs instead of blindly obeying them we could extent the human capacity to “bear reality”. I think people should be taught to be skeptical, willing to believe but requiring proof. The subjects that need to be questioned in my opinion are religion, politics and law, and even science. Science is always in need of skeptical inquiry: While we can be so sure something is fact, a new study could disprove decades of previous research.

Hamill tells us that “Unless we learn to articulate our own emotions, we cannot prevent other My Lais and other Viet Nams from recurring” (Hamill 548). I feel like lying alongside the problem of not being able to clearly articulate strong emotions, not enough people have those emotions to begin with. If you ask my parents generation, and even some older and younger ones, you will hear almost unanimous contempt for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. Most people will tell you they believed then, and if not in the past they do now, that the war in Viet Nam was morally bankrupt. It is very different from what you hear from an array of people of all ages regarding the wars we are currently in. Most people do not think that our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is bad, in fact, from a combination of the government and the media, most people are in favor of the war, though they cannot say why. Many people still believe that there was and still is WMD’s in Iraq, even though we found that to be false years ago.



Once an idea gets out there, it stays out there. If gullible people heard one opinion first, you’d be hard pressed to convince them otherwise. That is why I like what Hamill says, “You will be held accountable” (Hamill 552). I think this is a lesson the media needs to relearn. They have the ability to manipulate the minds of millions of Americans, and they should choose what they say with more care. They should report the unbiased truth, but unfortunately every media station has some sort of political alliance. Take Fox News for example: Their slogan is “fair and balanced” but this is a preposterous notion, anybody who can watch T.V. without bringing their personal prejudices into the equation knows that.

There certainly is an acceptable violence in society. Here in Arizona you are allowed to beat your child, in certain ways. I don’t necessarily disagree with this, and I am in no way a pacifist. I don’t believe you should be able to cause too much harm to your child, but I have no problem with a parent smacking or spanking their child when they have done something wrong. As long as the child is not in serious danger, nobody has a right to tell the parent how to raise their family. Hamill wrote this piece in 1990, thought it seems like he is speaking from farther back. I don’t know how things were in 1990, but I find it hard to believe a man could beat a woman in the middle of a sidewalk and people would pass by looking the other way. I know for a fact that would not happen around here. I have seen it, there is no way to stop a batterer, but I have seen citizens beat the daylight out of a man beating his girlfriend/wife. This is acceptable violence to me. When I hear a rapist got the same treatment when he finally got locked up in prison, I will never weep for him.

I believe as our country has progressed, we have become more “humanitarian” in nature. The general population knows that beating a woman is wrong, and many will step in to stop it if they see it happen. We still have our flaws, and likely always will, but we can continue to try to make the world a better place for everybody, not just for some.





Work Cited

Hamill, Sam. The Necessity to Speak. 6/17/2010. Print.

Kevin Powers’ “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting”

Kevin Powers’ “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” reminds me of Lt. Jimmy Cross in the first chapter from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”. He spends much of his time in Vietnam thinking Martha, the girl he loved back home. As in the book, this poem puts you in the man's shoes, lying in a fox hole amidst a monsoon of gunfire. While there is truly no way a person can know what an individual experienced while fighting in a war, the poet does his job of conveying the feeling, making it easily relatable to an ordinary person.



In the first stanza of Powers' poem he describes a young man confessing his love for a woman, "I tell her I love her like not killing/or ten minutes of sleep/beneath the low rooftop wall" (lines 1-3). When you are facing death, you can relate deeper emotions to the mundane acts of human life. You never know how much you love not killing, or what a pleasure a quick nap can bring, until you may never have those choices again. He is obviously trying to express how deeply he loves this woman, and in that moment he sees how precious things he took for granted in the past truly are.



A remark made to the man while in his fox hole from one Pvt. Bartle runs, "war is just us/making little pieces of metal/pass through each other" (Powers lines 10-12). What a remarkably philosophical quote this is, completely removed from the politics and prejudices of war, looking at their predicament with new eyes. War has, over the ages, been boiled down to simple statements by poets and writers of the time, and this is a powerful interpretation of modern warfare. While in the past, before the time of firearms and ICBM's, war was a much more personal matter. In order to take one’s life you had to be hand to hand, face to face with your opponent. You had to look into a man's eyes as you stripped the life away from him. Today war is a machine run by heavy weaponry devised to obliterate the opponent while sending the least number of ground troops in as possible. It is just humans sending metal pieces through other humans: hot metal that sears the flesh and makes the blood boil before lying cold for eternity.



Going back to the Greek tragedies of old, poets and writers tell tales of love and war, they delve into the depths of human intrigue. Often the two subjects are intertwined, as in the Fall of Troy: A whole war began because of Paris' love for Helen. The reason human life is so interesting is because of our capacity to feel, to love, to suffer. If we did not get our hearts broken when our love fails us, would there be a point to love?

Works Cited

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990. Print

Powers, Kevin. “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” Poetry Foundation. February 2009. 15 June 2010. Web. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182821

Wislawa Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11”

Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11” truly reads like a picture. Every sentence brings forward the face of fear and terror, the memory of despair and tragedy. Describing the poor souls jumping from the flaming building, Szymborska writes, “The photograph halted them in life/and now keeps them/ above the ground towards the earth” (lines 3-6). This recalls the shock and anxious anticipation I felt when watching the footage for the first time, the melancholy felt re-watching, knowing that these people have long passed, yet they plunge every time as for the first.


In the next passage these people are further described, “Each is still complete/with a particular face/ and blood well hidden” (Szymborska lines 7-9). Reading this tells me to remember the individual lives of the people who died that day. I believe it is important to remember this while looking through the photographs of the aftermath: The bloodstained streets, littered with debris and severed limbs. I have tried, and I really cannot imagine being put into their situation: Choosing whether to perish in a fiery abyss or frantically flying out of the windows before falling like Icarus. I have tremendous respect for all the lost souls that perished not only on September 11, put I respect and pity every innocent that is unjustly put to death before their time.


I have looked at more photographs, videos, files and articles about 9/11 than many others I know. I know many people who do not care to look at the horrific images taken that day, whether because they have a weak stomach, or simply because they are unconcerned with the matter. As Americans we cannot shut our eyes to horrible images. To know what needs to be done to make a change, you must be willing to look at the problem. We are fighting the longest war in United States history, and it doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon. As told by Devin Dwyer and Luis Martins, “According to the Pentagon, 1,000 service members have been killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since combat operations began in the region nearly nine years ago. This includes 15 service members killed in Pakistan and one in Uzbekistan” (“http://www.icasualties.org/oef/”). According to IraqBodyCount.org, the number of civilian deaths from the combined wars we have been in is roughly 100,000 people. We went into this war based on revenge, but does our cause justify the costs? If we are not willing to really see all this death, then we are powerless to end it.


If you are easily upset, perhaps you should avoid this video, if you can take it though, please watch the whole thing. These brave men and women who fell or jumped to their deaths deserve the recognition and the remembrance.

Works Cited List

Szymborska, Wislawa. “Photograph from September 11.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. November 7, 2005. June 14 2010. Web. http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2008/09/wislawa-szymborska-photograph-from.html



ICasualties: Operation Enduring Freedom: Afghanistan." ICasualties: Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom Casualties." Web. 16 June 2010. http://www.icasualties.org/oef/.

Welcome

Hello, welcome to my blog. He is a short video summarizing a few things about me/

Vladimir Nabokov seems to be a highly opinionated individual. He believes that a “good reader” should come into a book without any preconceived notions about it. He believes that a “good reader” always re-reads a book as to grasp it in its entirety. He even has opinions about what makes some writers “good” and makes some mediocre. He believes a good reader “is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense”.

The question I find myself asking is “Who is this Nabokov to say who is a good reader?”. I believe I am a good reader, but I only like to read things that interest me. Some have declared Charles Dickens to be one of the greatest writers of all time 1, The Catcher in the Rye is on the Time Top 100 greatest novels of all time list 2. Trying to read Tales of Two Cities makes me fall asleep faster than George H.W. Bush listening to the former first lady speak 3. I don’t believe you can say that somebody is a good writer, or somebody is a good reader. People will read if they have an interest in what they read. I can’t say I have a favorite writer, or a favorite genre of books, because I don’t. I read some things, and some things catch my interest. If that happens I will likely re-read the book eventually, but that is not something you should strive to do. If you don’t like a book, and are having trouble reading it, that does not necessarily mean that you are a bad reader, or that the author is a bad writer: you simply aren’t taken with the story.



1.) http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081029061046AAovL5E

2.) Grossman, Lev; Richard Lacayo (2005). "All-Time 150 Novels: The Complete List". Time. http://205.188.238.181/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

3.) http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/1/George-H-W-Bush-finds-first-lady-s-speech-boring-653052.html