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.