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