1.) Jihad Vs. McWorld
2.) Being Peace
Emma Donharl
Humanities
Seminar Reflection
Some opinions that were expressed during the seminar were the ideas of what it means to find yourself. I thought that the essence of finding yourself and being content is love. There is a saying that my dad likes to spout when my sister and I belittle ourselves. The saying is, “If you can’t love yourself, how can you expect for anyone to love you.” I think that this holds true to everything. If you have no faith, you won’t fly. I loved the idea Gregor had; the idea that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. This idea is what caused me to think of the Beatles song, and then the idea that the root of everything good is love. I’m convinced that everything this author was trying to say was just to love, plain and simple.
- Why would it be so hard to get in touch with yourself?
The reason it would be so hard to get in touch with ourselves, I believe, is because we are constantly so distracted by outside forces. We have so many things to be doing that we can’t possibly take the time to find ourselves. We, as a society, encourage emotional laziness. What good does it do for our economy to look into our feeble, human emotions? It’s not earning us any money. We can’t feed our family with emotions. This mentality is frustrating. Why must we make our lives a struggle by filling them with bad emotions? Make the choice. Go for the job you love, and it will benefit your life for the better. In the writing ‘Being Peace’ by Thich Nhat Hanh, he says, “Aware of the suffering created by attachments to views, wrong perceptions , we are determined to avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views.” We consume unnecessary feelings and ideas and we cling to them and we become miserable. We’ll blame the misery on anything that we are originally uncomfortable with. If we lose the ties of gaining by harming (gossiping) and the grip this country holds on the idea of superiority is happiness, we are steps closer to peace.
In society today, free love is connected with hippies, supposedly a bad connotation. Hippies had the idea of peace and love being connected. Crazy, right? To build something truly strong, you must break it all down, and then build it back up from the bottom up. If we break ourselves down and look at what’s there, in time come to love yourself, and then encourage people to do the same, we are on a promising path to peace. True strength comes within, whether within a person or within a country. It’s hard to look in and love what you see. Right there is everything wrong with you; you’re painful memories, your insecurities, and often the horrid monster of anger. It takes a lifetime to undo this stuff, but if you start early, you can recognize when you are angry and possibly contain a bad situation. It’s not that simple though. You constantly change and add to the bad memories, the anger, and the insecurities. It soon becomes a skill that you have, noticing and preventing these calamities. Soon you notice that you live in the present, as Thich Nhat Hanh says in ‘Being Peace’, “Aware that life is available only in the present moment and that it is possible to live happily in then here and now…” There is nothing better than that.
As I mentioned in multiple paragraphs above, the idea Gregor instilled in my head and the connection to the Beatles clicks to this reading like clock gears to me. “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, there’s nothing you can’t sing that can’t be sung, there’s nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game, it’s easy: all you need is love.” The Beatles were truly revolutionary and their ideas were too. I’ve been listening to them since I’ve been in the womb, but I’ve never really noticed their impact in my life. The thoughts they’ve sung about is what I’ve unconsciously based the entire way I live on. Its unfathomable to me that other people can’t grasp these ideas as quickly as I can. This reading just clarified something for me, and I can literally feel myself changing as we go through these readings.
Questions
1. Does celibacy really help the Buddhist way, or make it harder?
*Talk to a monk; go on the internet and research.
2. Why don’t we stop defense arms if they’d help so many people?
*Speculate. That’s the best I can do. If you find anything, please let me know. This idea drives me nuts.
3. Is Buddhism like Evolution, where we are preventing people from learning about it? If not, why aren’t more people reading about it? If people are educated, why aren’t they using this practice?
3.) The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Emma Donharl
Humanities
Omelas Reflections
REACTION
In the Omelas seminar, Stephan made a comment about happiness compared to Yin and Yang. He didn’t hit the point, and I believe Kaia made the same point. They both had the idea that the knowledge of pain gives us a higher spectrum for happiness. I utterly agree with this idea and have since I entered the double digits of age. I think that as human beings we start out with no idea of happiness and no idea of pain. As we grow and we gain the memories of both sides of the spectrum, the range for each grows. An example for both is if your cat gets squished by a garage, your potential for a higher happiness goes up. When you fall in love, your pain meter drops into a lower state of misery. I think all humans have this scale inside us, it just matters what we do with it. This connects to our last seminar and knowing ourselves. If we accept this scale, we know our selves a little better.
CONNECTIONS
Omelas reminds me of The Uglies series. These books are set in the future, after our generation tried to kill us all. Each city was separate from the other and people only thought of their own city. Within the community the people were separate. The “uglies” lived across the river from New Pretty town where the “pretties” lived, and then the “middle pretties” and the “crumblies” lived on the outskirts. The change for ugly to pretty occurred on your 16th birthday and from birth, you were brainwashed to hate your biological features. During the operation that turned you pretty, they put lesions in your brain that caused you to be “pretty-minded.” Being pretty-minded basically turned you into a materialistic alcoholic that had your life as one big party. The connection to Omelas was the separation and the idea of happiness. The humans in Omelas were separated from the child, as the “pretties” were separated from the “uglies”. Both communities relied on something to keep them content; New Pretty Town with the lesions, Omelas with drooz. There are major differences with the two places, but the separation stuck out to me.
DETAILED RESPONSE
· Why does this author think we can't describe happiness in our society (line 37)?
I think that the author thought that we can’t describe happiness because we have never seen a happy person. Everyone we see on a daily basis has a little worry, a little pain that clouds the happiness that we all hope to experience. The human brain focuses our attention onto the little thing that bugs us in the hope to fix it and to reach that goal of bliss. What we don’t realize is that the little things are just temporary and if we just look past them, we’ll come to some plane of contentment, at least for a small time. In today’s society we focus upon the little things, and not the big picture.
When I first read this story, I thought of medieval times. I cannot connect the idea of happiness to a “sophisticated” person. The author says, “They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy.” We figure today’s society as sophisticated and complicated, too far above happiness. This idea of superiority is what is holding us back from reaching bliss, from my speculations. If we lose this identity of superiority, we get another step closer to peace in Emma’s Guide to the Universe.
Q+A
· What did the author mean by all smiles have become archaic?
· What is a better allegory than mine?
· Does the author continue with stories like this one?
*Ursula K. Le Guin has written many stories but I couldn’t find any stories that kept going off of the Omelas story, but her other stories are quite intriguing.
4.) Geopoliticus Watching the Birth of A New Man
Emma donhasrk
Hatching
I slowly opened my eyes to a pale yellow glow. This is nice. I was shrouded in this warm, silky smooth… thing. I slowly stretched and my back gave a series of pops in agreement. Lazily blinking, I thought I could live here forever. After 1027 breaths, I started to get bored. I could kind of see the body of a grown man. Mine. My body. Who was I? I couldn’t remember my name, who I was, why I was in this… thing. I scoured my brain for these matters. Time passed, as did 2980 breaths. My stomach growled in hunger and my bladder ached. Curled up in a ball like this, I was not going to relieve myself. 3174. The golden wrap felt like it was closing tighter as the air flowed in and out of my lungs. Shifting around seemed to alleviate it, but the more I moved that sooner it closed in, forcing me to move again. 5021. I couldn’t stand it for much longer. 5969. The silk was strangling me; I was in constant movement. I heard loud tearing followed by my entire world crashing around me. I lay still for a few breaths, but I lost my original count. I started over again. Everything seemed fine, until I saw the crack. The moment I glimpsed that pale ray of sunshine, the air sucked itself out of my lungs and continued like a vacuum. Struggling for my life, I clawed at that damn material, forcing myself up through the crack. Kicking and tearing, managed to get one hand outside of the sliver. Feeling the consciousness seep from my limbs, I tried in vain to force my head through the gap. As I slipped over into sleep, I felt warmth on my face. This is nice.
I woke up to this face kneeling over me. Its cheeks were filled with fat and its eyes sparkled in wonder. Something was coming out of its mouth. It wasn’t see-able, but it was there. It touched my face and more of this stuff flowed out. Suddenly there was more of the invisible substance. I shoved the child away, but it didn’t stop. Finally, a thin, bony hand reached out and touched my mouth. The thing stopped. I stared blankly at the starved face above me. Its watery gray eyes examined me; its auburn hair fell brushed my cheek. I couldn’t tell the sex of the human. Its mouth formed more of what came out of mine, different times with different… sounds. Sound. Perfect. After the 12th time it… spoke, something lit up in the back of my head. I nodded, and the sounds made sense. The person fixed my gaze, and spoke in a withered, harsh voice: “Welcome, New Man. This is your world now.”
.) Dulce et Decorum Est
.) Dulce et Decorum Est
Emma Donharl
Dulce et Decorum Est Reflection
Jenna and I had banter between ourselves about human nature. At the closing of the argument, I asked, “Why do we fight?” referring to the idea she presented that humans do not have a fighting nature. She thought a little bit, and then replied that humans fight because we want something versus the idea that we fight for what we need (instinct). I have been thinking about this all weekend, and taking the war idea to a lower scale, I’ve come up with a few contradictories to this statement. The first is my friend Mikey. Mikey is a notorious hot-head, and almost every time I talk to him he has either a) recovering from a fight, b) fighting, or c) about to get in a fight. He’s been this way since elementary school, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why. I’ve talked to him about it, and he just smiles and says that’s how he rolls. He might fight because he likes it, but that brings me to my next argument. What about people who are even-tempered? I know that I’ve snapped and hauled off on someone for no reason before, simply because they were standing too close or eating their food too loud (you have no idea how MAD this makes me). If fighting for what we want is the only reason we fight, is there something wrong with Mikey and me? And if you take the question above as true, why aren’t people who need things fighting for them?
I have learned about using the Curious/Difficulty Journal, with my line “All went lame; All Blind”. It taught me to question every line, to confront what I don’t know rather than pass over it. Poetry has every line, every word placed correctly for that meaning. Analyzing each line has also helped. Not with this poem, for it is fairly simple, but for more complex poems it helps. Actually, doing this on every reading material this would help.
I deem that it is right to fight for your country under certain circumstances. When you believe in what you are fighting for. If your country is abusing you and your life, using you as an expendable resource, then no. I feel, deep in my core, that war was something beautiful. It was personal, for you cannot kill or wound your enemy without being a mere three feet away. Men had to train for their entire lives to do this. It was their career. They might have been abused from the leaders, such as today, but the fight was theirs. The determined what the outcome, not the leaders. Today we can kill millions of people from the other side of the world. Doesn’t that scare you? You could wipe out an entire country with a blink of an eye. I don’t believe in war or what we are fighting for today.
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Emma Donharl
9/7/10
Humantities
Roots of War Seminar
1. Jonathon tied this concept from Ehrenreich: “Addiction” provides only a pallid and imprecise analogy for the human relationship to war; parasitism – or even predation – is more to point” to the movie “The Hurt Locker.” I totally agree with Jonathon in that the character in the movie was addicted to the adrenaline rush when defusing the bomb which is similar to Ehrenreich’s concept of addiction.
2. The seminar did not influence or change my thinking about the roots of war. It was interesting to hear different opinions; however, no new ideas or opinions were represented in the conversation.
3. Connections. There is a lyric in a song by Scary Kids Scaring Kids: “a virus known as rage is spreading and destroying everything.” This is similar to Ehrenreich’s theory and the Seminor discussion in that the concept of war is in our heads and is like a “plague”.
4. My strengths included listening to what other people had to say and not judging them. I felt I grasped the concepts expressed by others. I need to work on talking more and participating in the seminar. I plan to achieve this goal by putting myself out there and speaking up even though I’m afraid.
