Gone with the wind...

I suppose if you still read this (and my site meter tells me some people actually do check in from time to time) then I should let you know that I have moved. I'm still writing, but now it's at Dancing Through Life. Check it out. This place feels old. Time to start something a little more fresh.

Boston

I'm in New Hampshire right now. My friends and I, you see, decided to trek up north to visit some friends we met through our study abroad experiences who go to UNH. They came and visited us in Springfield, so we thought we'd return the favor. Thus, on Monday we hopped in the car and schlepped 25 straight hours to spend a week in the great Northeast (particularly Boston and New Hampshire).

We've got a lot of wonderful things on the agenda. We visited UNH's campus, we spent some time in Portsmouth and saw a Celtics game, and so much more. Yesterday we bought SRO tickets to Fenway Park to watch the Royals play the Sox. Though I couldn't overtly root for Kansas City for fear of getting my ass handed to me by a mob of angry Bostoners, I cheered in my heart and much to my surprise the Royals won! We even found ourselves sitting about sixteen rows up behind home plate by the fifth inning. It was a great evening.

Tonight we'll be in Boston again to watch the Boston Ballet perform some of my favorite choreography of all time. It's a show called Black and White, a showcase of Jiri Killian - a prominent choreography from the Netherlands Dans Theatre - choreography. I fully expect an incredible show and a moving evening.

We've seen great nature, wonderful cities, and inredible events (who'd have thought the Royals could EVER beat the Sox?), the best part has been the comradery. I have incredible friends. They bring life to the situations we find ourselves in. They care about myself and each other. It's some wonderful complimentarity.

Last night Dave, my best friend who got me going to church again, and I had a great conversation on the drive home from Boston about liberalism vs. conservativism, our growth as people throughout our four years of college, and what life might look like in the years to come. He talked and I listened. And then I talked and he listened. And I felt like we both really listened, which is such a rarity I cannot even begin to express how wonderful it is to experience it.

I love being with people. I love even more being with people who respect each other and are committed to aiding each other in growth and development. It's such a beautiful thing.

I've got other issues I'd like to blog about soon as I've had some deep thoughts percolating in my head during this trip that I'd like to get out, but that will have to wait for the next day or two. To my family who happens to read this, I love you and I'll see you all soon!

-Marko

Am I a Writer?

After my last post, I started to realize how much relief I feel when I post something. There is something cathartic about creation, about expression through some media, that I'm attracted to. I've always written songs, played music, danced, or written when times got tough. Suddenly, for whatever reason, I think I've convinced myself that I'm too busy to do those things anymore. Big mistake.

So now I find myself writing, and further, I find myself asking myself if I am "a writer," whatever that means. Not that I'll ever attempt to do anything with it, but the fact that writing is an incredible form of relief is a convincing enough argument for me to stick with it, at least casually. And as the next few weeks will be stressful indeed - papers upon papers, graduation anxiety, etc - you can bet I'll make a few more posts before the semester is out to help get away.

The recent stress in my life has led me to some new conclusions that I feel like I should try and talk about on here. I think I'll just make a list of things I've been thinking a lot about recently. I haven't had time to systematize it anyway, so it's all in there kinda haphazardly.

1) Some things in life are worth forgetting about. While there are lots of things that are worthy of dwelling over and systematically working through, I've discovered that sometimes it really is okay to just forget about some things. Some things are just too small and minor in the grander scheme of things to really stress about.

2) There are a whole plethora of things we simply can't know. God, Jesus, the afterlife, what other people are really thinking or motivated by, the future, etc. There are just so many things that fall outside of our human minds. Often times this means these things fall into the category of stuff worthy of forgetting about (or at least not dwelling over) and other times it means we should give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, it doesn't help to be pompous about everything and pretend like we're the epoch of wisdom. We're not.

3) It's okay to be different. Being a 22 year old male ballet dancer, a philosophy major, a liberal amidst a family of (mostly) intense conservatives, intensely questioning religion in a town - and family - of seriously serious Christian folk, and the like are OKAY! It's fine to be who I want to be as long as I've reflected upon that and know why I'm doing it. It's also important to maintain integrity and morality amidst these things, but a lot of things are just noise. And when other people try to question my life, I've gotten much more okay with writing them off.

4) People are just about the only things that matter to me. Friends and family. That's it. Screw religious dogma. Screw making money. If God truly is dead in the Nietzschian sense, then the only thing that CAN matter is other people. We make the darkness bearable. We bring light and joy to each other. We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. Everything else just exists to either enable relationships between people or get in the way.

That's all the random ponderings I've got for now. Hope everyone is doing well and I look forward to writing and reading more on the blogosphere soon.

A time to be born, and a time to die...

I'm not sure why I'm writing this. I can't pretend to say that I'm going to commit to anything, that I want to grow as a writer, or any of that. What I can say for sure is that I need so very badly to express myself in words. There are some emotions, some states of mind, that are only fully realized when they're shared. I learned that in my Rhetorical Criticism class.

I had one of those moments the other day; one of those moments where only words can bring into existence the true emotion, the gravity, the reality of a situation. I grew up with a friend named Keith. He and his brother Scott were two of my very best friends in high school. They went to youth group with me, I went to their house nearly every day for video games and snacks, and we'd laugh as we watched stupid movies together for years and years. I went to college and Keith and I remained close. I'd still come home and spend time with him and his family - though that time became less and less frequent after I moved away from the Lake - and we were still a big part of each others' lives.

Keith and I still keep close. He comes to my ballet performances when he can. I make it to Fulton to visit him and his girlfriend when I can. I love his soul, and he nurturs mine. Scott, his little brother, lived in Springfield for the past year. We talked from time to time, but never really spent much time together. I didn't know him well after I left high school except what I heard through his brother.

But still, when I heard on the phone Tuesday afternoon that Scott had taken his own life, I was demolished. I got a text letting me know, a phone call to confirm, and then I do what I do whenever anything major happens in my life: I called my dad. And it wasn't until I spoke to my father that Scott's death, the reality of Scott's death, really came to me. All I said was, "Dad, Scott shot himself this morning. He's dead," and I was awash in grief. I was driving, so I had to pull my car over. And I wept.

He was twenty. And a good looking guy too.

I've wept a lot for Scott and for his family over the past few days. I've wept alone and I've wept with those who loved him like I did. He was a great kid with a heart of gold. He let us all know via facebook the morning he took his own life that he cared about us. He wrote:

"Scott knows that no words can express how much I care about all of you, so I hope you will settle for these. I love all of you for every minute of my life you were in it. You all made my life better in your own ways, and for that I can't say enough. Now I'm going somewhere that I can't be followed, and it saddens me to say it, but I must now say goodbye. Goodbye."

I weep even now as I read his loving words again. I wish there was more I could give him now besides words and tears.

Scott's words are a testament to his compassion. He was always trying to give me things. I have a collection of Scott memorabelia in my room this very moment that he gave to me. We shared our love of music, our devotion to those we care about, and we shared precious time together. We talked about girls and guitars. About high school and our futures. He gave me so much.

And that's where Scott has to continue to live for me and for all of those amazing people whom his life touched: In his willingness to give. Who knows why he lost hope or why he felt that he had no way out; one cannot make sense out of a senseless act. But now it is our job to press on, to love for Scott, not to stockpile our time and compassion but to hold our hands open for all to take freely. The only way we can find our way out of this, to make the darkness bearable, is together. It is by loving the way Scott loved. Freely. With abandon. Until the end.

I'm going to miss you, my dear beloved friend. We all will. I hope you have found the peace you were looking for.

My Forays into Feminism...

I've considered myself a feminist for years. After taking several classes and reading various books that introduced me to the subject, I've been thoroughly inculcated to believe that women deserve reality on their own terms and we all need to be working to rid our lives of patriarchy in whatever way it manifests itself in our lives. As a man, I know that I have a particular perspective on this matter that may or may not always be perfectly in line with some of the more radical readings of feminist thought, but I also believe that doesn't matter. If feminism is about equality and finding solutions to the issues of patriarchy, then we have to see each other as individuals in a society facing an oppressive system which effects ALL of us, not just women.

That being said, yesterday was International Women's Day and when I walked into the building which houses my first class, I was greeted by a cornucopia of signs which were trying to point out male privilege. As a man (and a white one at that), I understand that I benefit from patriarchy in certain ways, so these signs were not necessarily a surprise to me. What really bothered me about these signs was that there perspective was intentionally antagonistic and as a man I felt essentialised, totalized, and moral degraded by them.

In a situation where equality is the goal, totalizing the other and making blanket statements about who they are and what they're like is terribly counter-productive. This is evidenced by the fact that many of the signs, by the end of the day, had graffiti scribbled on them by men claiming ownership over their privilege. You simply cannot expect men to recognize the ways in which patriarchy effects them by antagonizing them about it. It's demoralizing and it creates more injustice.

Further, I was personally offended by the ways in which these signs failed to realize that men are also effected negatively by patriarchy. In a hegemonic system of patriarchy, the only men who truly benefit are those who fit most perfectly into our ideals of patriarchy. Homosexuals, unathletic men, those deeply in touch with their emotions and feelings, and those who display what we might consider feminine characteristics regularly lose in this system. And the men who "win," I believe must do so by sacrificing much of what makes them who they are (i.e. their emotions, their capacity for care, their time spent at the gym maintaining that perfect Greek physique). What we're left with is a system which upon first glance benefits men and oppresses women, but upon further inspection truly demoralizes everyone involved by failing to realize them as individuals and forcing them into pre-conceived notions of what it means to be a man and a women. I would argue that nobody truly fits into these roles as they are conceived of as ideals in our society.

So I was offended yesterday on several levels. I was upset with the organization who put up these signs for 1) attacking me as a "man" and failing to realize my individuality or the complexity that the title "man" involves and 2) doing feminism in general a disservice. Antagonistic rhetoric never serves to build bridges between oppressors and the oppressed. The demonstration yesterday, I believe, only served to push people further into their corners.

Rest assured, I'm teaming up with a fellow feminist (a girl) and we're writing a respectful critique of yesterday's display (which, as it turns out, was perpetrated entirely by female faculty members) and sending it out to those involved and to our local student newspaper. I hope that this will raise awareness of the issues of gender inequality while at the same time build positive relations between men and women in a way that we might be able to work together to curtail oppressive systems at work in our lives.

Buddhism at Work...

Now I don't consider myself a serious Buddhist anymore (don't worry, Walter family), but that doesn't mean that I can't learn a lot from the Buddha and the simple truths he outlines in the Noble Eightfold Path. Let me share with you a bit of my life. This is going to include me sharing some stuff about myself which my family doesn't know, so if you're one of my family members you can either:
1) Stop reading now. Wouldn't want to tarnish your perfect idea of who I am!
or
2) Read this ALL THE WAY THROUGH before you start to make judgments about my character based off of it. Thanks!

So anyway, about a month or so after moving to Greece, I started smoking. In my defense, hanging out with Greeks regularly and not smoking is a bit like hanging out with your average American and not eating fast food. Possible? Yes. Likely? Not very. When I came back, I quit. I was smoke free all through the summer, but when I came back to Springfield I started smoking again. At first it was just pipes on the front porch every now and then. Then it was my pipe on my front porch every night. Before long, it was back to cigarettes regularly. I was smoking regularly (that is to say 3-5 cigarettes a day) from about September until last month with the exception of a few weeks here and there where I tried to quit unsuccessfully.

Quitting smoking is tough, people. I only smoked 3-5 cigarettes a day and it was HARD. I can only imagine those 3-5 packs a day people and how insanely difficult it must be for them. I STILL want to smoke every day and it's been somewhere around six weeks since I smoked. At this point, it's not about feeling normal again but about learning that this state of constant craving - sometimes more and sometimes less, though it's increasingly less and less - is my new state of normalcy and I've got to learn to deal with that.

So even though I'd tried to quit several times after starting up again, I never could. What was different this time then? Buddhist psychology. Plain and simple. Let me explain.

The idea behind a lot of Buddhist psychology is that we are what we think. When we are constantly thinking about something, some object, some person, some emotion, it begins to consume us. We become our emotions or cravings that we revolve around. Science backs this up. When we think about things or encounter situations regularly, we begin to form neural pathways that in many ways dictate the way we'll react. They create what our mind considers "normal." So, for example, if every day you react to situations with anger, your brain will form neural pathways which make anger your default setting. You get addicted to certain chemicals and certain pathways that those chemicals follow. Naturally, when you try to break habits then, you'll experience some forms of withdrawal. It's just the way we work.

This is a simple truth, neither good nor bad, but it can be used in a myriad of ways. I chose to apply these ideas to my everyday life when I put my foot down to quit smoking finally. Every day I wake up and take a shower first thing. It's a fairly mindless activity, but I turned it into the doorway for change. You see, when I hopped in the shower every day, I would start giving myself positive talks. I'd be lathering the shampoo into my hair saying, "Today is going to be a good day. You can totally do this, and you can totally have a great time doing it." I began every day building myself up. I did this not only to enforce my decision to stop smoking and give myself strength to get through another non-smoking day, but also to try and relieve some of the natural depression that stemmed from nicotine withdrawals. You know what? It worked like a charm.

It's a beautiful thing! And now that I'm calling myself a non-smoker again (it's been long enough that I think that's warranted), I'm using my morning shower time to reach different ends. Lately, I've been working on my self-esteem. I'll be rinsing out my conditioner thinking, "Dammit, man, you're cool. People like you, and why shouldn't they?" Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be some type of egoist or turn myself into a monster. I just think that I deserve to have a feeling of self-worth, and I'm going to give it to myself. I find myself walking around campus happier, smiling and whistling more, looking people in the eyes and smiling, and holding my head a bit higher.

The point is this: Buddhism has some really simple yet profound truths that are directly applicable to our lives. Even just small daily meditations can change your life. You are what you think, and it's pretty much unavoidable.

Sometime I'd like to spend a bit more time talking about some of the more profound notions of this line of thinking. I know this thinking works for emotional pathways, but what about propositions? Can I convince myself of anything but meditating on it long enough? John Wesley, for example, used to say, "Preach it until you believe it." In this light, that thought has some serious implications. That's all for another day, however. I hope this post hasn't messed with too many ideas of who I am!

On Being Wild...

I just finished reading "Walden," Henry David Thoreau's masterpiece, for my Senior Seminar. Yesterday we had our final discussion about it, and I realized something strange. There's a little throw-away line about how we all need to do something to keep us "wild," to keep us alive and mindful, to have something to keep us excited about life and not stagnant. We went around talking about what we do to keep ourselves wild, what revs our engines so to speak, and I realized that I've really lost that part of myself somehow over the past few years.

I used to be really passionate about so much in a childlike, simple kind of way. Every day was an adventure which I attacked with vim and vigor. Somehow though, for a myriad of reasons, my life became very calculated. I do most things now because I should do them, or because they're good for me, or because they're safer, but that passion and intensity have somewhat dissipated.

I'm not saying that my life is bland or boring or that I'm not sure about what I'm doing. I have a great life and I know where I'm headed, but there's something not quite there. It's like I'm not really getting out and living, stepping outside of myself and growing. I feel more like I'm in a defensive state these days. Like I'm just preparing for the next bad thing to happen. It's really draining and stressful. I feel very anxious a lot of the time about my life.

So I guess that I'm going to be on a quest to reclaim my wildness, to live boldly and suck the marrow out of life. I don't really have any idea how to go about that yet, but I'm really ready for this cold winter - both literally and metaphorically - to be over in my life. I've spent enough time recoiling. Time to stir some shit up.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears! I just want to be excited, really excited, about something again.

Clearing my Mind...

Lately, when I hold Yoko, I've been talking to her. I've been working on strengthening our bond together because as I see it, she's going to be the only thing coming with me from this life into the next.

When I graduate and leave Drury, all of my friends will disperse. The community I've worked four years to create, the people who've been with me through it all, essentially the loves of my life, will disperse. My best friend David is moving to New Orleans with the Episcopal Church to help rebuild. Matt will be moving to Tennessee on scholarship to Vanderbilt's divinity school. Valerie will head to Kansas City with Nic to work at some company. There will be a few people left in Springfield, but I won't have a home there anymore. I'm so proud of all of us. We're all doing really great things with our lives, but it's really difficult to grow up and see through my childish desire to just put my fingers in my ears, close my eyes, and stomp around screaming at the change.

Yoko, however, will be delving deep into the unknown together. Together, we'll either make it in the dance world or we won't. It feels scary, I guess, to be going through the biggest change in my life with only a dog by my side. Not that she lacks commitment or loyalty or anything, but our conversations tend to be a bit one-sided.

It's tough for me to see the up side to graduation sometimes. I'm leaving the place I love, the people I love, the lifestyle I love, to go after something I'm not even sure I'll be able to make a living doing. I'm not saying that I'm choosing the wrong career path (I'm pretty positive I'm not), but it just seems strange to me that for the first time in my life I'm not as excited about the future as I am about right now. The future just seems like the end of today, which is a sad death in my mind. It's going to be a tough fight. That's for sure.

Is this normal? I feel a bit like a tamed animal who is about to get dropped off on the side of the road to fend for itself. Sink or swim. And do it alone. It's really terrifying.

The Ends of Science...

Yesterday in science class I was having a discussion (some would call it a debate) with the chemistry professor. He made some off-handed comment about how God, or what we often times call God, is really just the gaps that science has yet to fill. "Mystery" is really just what we don't understand YET, but given enough time and testing, we'll get there.

Now, if you know me at all, you'll know that I'm really going to resist statements like that. They're dehumanizing, hubristic, and ultimately (I believe) wrong. So after asking a few more questions to make sure I had his position right (he conceded that it's very possible that science will never figure everything out, but the initial point that everything is essentially explainable in terms of physical cause and effect relationships and that the God of "mystery" will get eeked out given enough time remains) and then I tried to defend a bigger God than that, or at least the possibility that the universe isn't composed of entirely of phenomena explainable in terms of descriptive propositions. If I can get that point across, I've at least made room for science and God to coincide without encroaching upon each others' territory too much.

So let me try to give a few examples that get at my intuitions.

Imagine I find someone who has NEVER encountered sadness in any way and then I give them a book containing every single proposition about the entirely physical phenomenon of depression. This book contains everything from the physical and chemical states that cause people to feel depressed to a list of actions that depressed people have been known to commit while depressed. The book has everything. Journal entries from depressed people, lists of famous people who have had chronic depression, etc, etc. Now I ask you this: Assuming that this person had never experienced any sort of sadness and she or he had then learned everything there is to know about depression, would she or he have any idea what it feels like to be depressed?

Or how about this one:

Yesterday I went to go see a production from the Alvin Ailey II dance company. They came to Springfield and put on a FANTASTIC show (which I got $10 student rush tickets to!). There was one piece in the middle entitled "Essence" which I believe tried to articulate using poetic movement how it feels to be trapped inside yourself with some monstrous issue. The dance was just one woman on a chair. She stayed with the chair the whole time, unable to break her attachment to it no matter how much pain it seemed to be causing her to be sitting there alone. She writhed, she struggled, she laughed, she cried, she even tried to compose herself and put on the good face, but all to no avail. It was a beautiful piece, and incredibly moving. Here's an excerpt from it that I found on youtube:



Anyway, I was watching this piece while sitting next to one of my very good friends whose mother passed away last semester. I blogged about it here, and you can read a bit about her experiences. While watching it, I couldn't help but relate the dance to how she must be feeling. Going through something like the death of a parent. Seemingly alone. No one can really help deal with the pain. I have to admit that I cried a bit during the piece, overwhelmed by the emotion it caused me thinking about my friend and what she must be going through.

Again I ask you: If I gave you every bit of information regarding me, my friend, the dance we watched together, our chemical states, etc, would you be able to feel how we felt last night? Even now I must admit that if I had every propositional fact possible about my friend, her mother's fatal illness, and knew her even better than I did, it would be impossible for me to know exactly what she's going through.

My point is that there is an end to science. There is a chasm, an unbridgeable chasm, that science cannot cross when we go from the realm of propositions to the realm of humanity. Science simply cannot give us insight into how things feel, into how they effect us as meaning-seeking people. Science cannot help us grasp subjective reality through facts and data. So yes, science is useful and helpful and arguably even necessary, but it can never tell us everything. There will always be a gap between science's explanations of my friend's pain and my friend's pain from the subjective point of view. And to me, that's a good thing.

The Time Has Come...

to blog again. Not because I've had some life revelation, not because I feel a deeply ingrained need to express myself on a public forum, and not even because I feel like I have a whole lot to say. I'm starting again for two reasons. 1) I really need to stay in practice with my writing. If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward. 2) I miss my blogging community. It's a positive force in my life, so back to the grindstone I go. I'm not going to make any silly promises of "Oh, I'll be sure to blog every day for x days," or "I'm going to start a theme presentation that will keep me going for the next x weeks." I'll try to blog every morning since I have the time and I just want to follow my thoughts and see where they lead me, linguistic errors be damned.

Today I'll write about what I think is probably the biggest joy in my life as of late, which is my puppy, Yoko. Named after the infamous Yoko Ono (I wanted a name to do with the Beatles, but Lucy was too popular and Eleanor sounds strange for a dog), MY Yoko came into my life unexpectedly in late November of last year. A good friend of mine who is closely involved with one of the local shelters came to me one morning during class and said, "Hey, you wouldn't want to take a puppy we just rescued, would you?" Apparently it was close to euthanasia day at the pound and my friend took Yoko home with her (I'm not quite sure of the legality of that move, but what I don't know won't hurt me) to save her from certain death. Seeing as I have a fenced in backyard where I'm staying now, I agreed to hold onto Yoko. This is how our story began.

That day I came home to a small black puppy with a head three times too large for her body who enjoyed playing tug of war with her rope toy. My roommates and I weren't sure whether or not we were going to keep her - there was some disagreement between the three of us for the ensuing week or two on the issue - but that night sealed the deal for me. That night, you see, Yoko got VERY sick. She went from playful puppy to bedridden babe in about three hours. She had severe diarrhea and vomiting, so I took her to the vet the very next morning. The diagnosis: Poor Yoko had flat and round worms, kennel cough (think bronchitis for dogs), and - you guessed it - parvovirus. Parvo, the virus's shorthand name, is like dysentery for dogs. With out patient care, most dogs have a 35-50% survival rate. Yikes. And with all the other ailments draining her immune system, I feared the worst. Most people would have put her to sleep right then and there, but I'm a big softy. Her big brown eyes had stolen my heart and I was ready for the fight.

The next week was intense for me and my little labrapei (that's the name I came up for her breed. Half black lab half shar pei). She didn't eat anything for about eight days. She didn't move either. She just sat curled up in our laps all day long. Every few hours I would have to force feed her pills or small amounts of pedialyte, or a nutritional gel the vet gave me, but aside from that she just looked sad.

The third day of parvo was the trough. She didn't sleep at all (which meant I didn't sleep at all) and she had a strong resemblance to one of those Ethiopian children you see on television who have no food. That morning, having not slept at all, I drove her to the vet as soon as it opened. I was ready for the vet to tell me that she needed to be put to sleep because she was doing so poorly, so that entire drive was heartbreaking for me. I sang James Taylor to her while she sat in my lap. I actually showed up an hour before the vet, so they let me sit in the waiting room with Yoko for an hour and they brought me coffee. I spent that entire hour holding her like a child and talking to her. I promised her lots of things about how happy I'd try to make her if she kept fighting, about how much fun we'd be together, and I assured her how much I loved her no matter what. It sounds sappy and silly, but it was a really strong experience for me.

Despite her appearance, the vet said she still had some fight in her. We pumped her full of fluids once again and I took her home to rest. The next day she turned the corner and started to slowly perk up, and it was all progress from there. Over the next few days, she started walking again, eating on her own, and having solid bowel movements. Again, it sounds silly, but you should have seen the smile on my face the first time she was able to eat on her own or even the first time she had solid poo. I'm officially hooked.

Since then, she grown exponentially (though she still hasn't quite grown into her ginormous head), learned all kinds of tricks, been potty trained, and just two days ago she learned to jump onto the bed for the first time. She's great for me. She gives me a reason to come home, something warm to hold onto while I watch movies, someone to snuggle with at night, and a constant playmate. You can see a few pictures to chronicle growth here. The first one is her at a few weeks old taken at the pound, the next one is her in December post-parvo (it was my Christmas card), and the last one is one I took this morning. She's only about halfway grown too!

Ft. Hood...

Thirteen individuals died and thirty-one were wounded at the shooting at Fort Hood. That means thirteen families have had the ultimate wound inflicted upon them. Thirteen mothers had their children torn from them. Thirteen fathers will watch their sons and daughters being lowered into the ground. And thirty-one families will be effected in ways they never could have imagined.

I want this to be kept in mind when we talk about Fort Hood. This idea should be in the foreground, on the tips of everyone's tongues at all times during this discussion. These were real people with real families who are experiencing real, inescapable, undeniable grief.

In the past week or so, I've heard different news organizations talk about this incident in different ways. Some of them haven't gotten past the idea I just mentioned. We're hearing news flashes about what Obama wants to do about it, about what Lieberman wants to do about it, about what the people want done about it. The BBC is reporting on it, and the world mourns with us over the deaths of soldiers on our own ground.

Perhaps we could have prevented it. The guy who committed the crime showed warning signs; he apparently talked to al Qaeda members via telephone and email. We knew about it. Maybe we can talk about how to prevent these kinds of things in the future. Maybe we can talk about what went wrong in this particular incident that made us do nothing in response to the warning signs he gave us. That might be an appropriate place to go with this discussion, and we're seeing it shift in that direction a bit.

What I've seen a lot of, sadly, is news organization using this terrible incident as fuel for their base. It's sensationalized, yes, like all other news stories are; however, I'm seeing that sensationalism turn into ignorance and fear-mongering like what we saw after 9/11. People are starting to blindly attack Islam again, talking about how violent and dangerous it is. They're beginning to turn this incident, one that thirteen families are going to be mourning for years to come, into another log on the fire of the crusade that we've been participating in for decades. It's become politicized, strategized, and mobilized to suddenly be some means to an end.

"It's Obama's fault!" I hear from Hannity and Limbaugh.

"Blame the Islamic extremists!" I hear from Beck.

I suppose this is my point: How does it reflect us as Americans if all we do with tragedies like this is turn them into propaganda for a party or a cause? We're all scrambling over how to use this event to drum up support for our presence in Afghanistan or attack our liberal "victim-loving" president, but thirteen families just want their children back. I see these actions as vulgar. It's repulsive. When are we going to stop being pundits and spinsters and start being human?

My two cents: Things like this are going to continue to happen across the globe until we can stop placing blame, stop going on crusades, stop marginalizing and ignoring people for our "causes" and start being compassionate, empathetic human beings towards each other.

History...

My African American Lit class has gotten me thinking a lot about history and the way it impacts our lives on an everyday level. Personally, I'm somewhat confused as to my own relationship to history, so I'd like to use this as a forum to work that struggle out.

The way I see it, we have two histories to relate to. The first is our personal history, which all of us have and cannot avoid. I am the youngest of three. My dad is a pastor and my mother is a nurse. There have been lots of different events and circumstances in my life that have shaped me to be the particular Mark that I am today. I've personally experience this kind of history and can reflect upon it and my relationship to it. For me, this is a fairly simple and unproblematic concept.

The second relationship to history is what really interests and perplexes me, however. I'm part of a culture. I live in a certain society at a certain time in history. While I understand the ramifications of how this effects my day-to-day life and has a PROFOUND impact on who I am, I fail to identify myself with it. It's a strange thought, but maybe I can illuminate it better by describing people who do identify with their cultural history.

African American writers, for example, spend a good deal of time focusing on how their cultural history shapes who they are. I'm reading Toni Morrison right now, and she seems to think that you cannot simply be an individual living in a society. You are a member of that society, and that society's history is your history which you must learn to deal with. Her characters have to learn what it means to be black, to have an oppressed and checkered history. I guess for a group who's history is a little more tangible in their daily life, I understand how this is relevant. Still, for me, I don't know.

My history is white-washed. George Washington cutting down the apple tree kinda stuff. It's a bunch of tall tales, myths, that never really happened but that we tell ourselves in order to justify our modern selves. Aside from that, I don't even know which history to look for. Am I an American? Am I European? Should I associate myself with the history of Great Britain as an Irish descendant? Exactly who I am is a little muddled and confusing, so exactly which history is "my" history is confusing as well.

I suppose on one level, people could say that it's important to understand how your history shapes you, but you don't have to personally identify with it. Currently, for example, if I were to personally identify myself as an American I'd feel nothing but ashamed of our actions. That's just me though. Thoughts? Comments? Reflections? I'd love to hear them!

Judgment...

I've been thinking about judgment a lot lately, about our rights to judge others and such. It makes me want to tell a story.

When I was in grade school, I got picked on a whole lot. I was tormented pretty mercilessly (grade school kids learn to torture long before they learn to be merciful, sadly) by what felt like every kid in the school for every reason they could find. I'm just starting to analyze and see how deeply these years have effected my personal growth as an adult and how much of that pain I still carry with me, but that's another post for another day.

What I want to convey first is how horrible this was to me as a child. I remember how much I hated everything about myself. I remember going shopping for clothes with my mom one day and crying in the dressing room because no matter what I tried on, I never looked cool enough. I remember the day after I got beat up on the playground by a kid begging my parents to not make me go back to school and face the ridicule of the moribund masses of my peers. There were lots of experiences like that. It was a hellish few years for me.

One of the kids who came after me the most was a little blond kid named Keith Baldwin. Keith was meaner to me than the rest which made me hate him the most. When he finally moved away my sixth grade year, I was completely relieved. "One less jerk to worry about," I thought. He moved to Jefferson City and I didn't hear a thing about him for a few years aside from the occasional line or two about how people missed him (which infuriated me) or about when people would go visit him. Then, one day in eighth grade, an email was circulated through my school. The teachers informed all of us that Keith and his little sister came home from school one day and the two of them were murdered by their mother. Their mother went insane and shot them to death and promptly turned the weapon on herself.

"Good," I thought. "One less jerk to worry about." When I thought that, it became apparent to me that I had some issues to work through.

Slowly, stories about how Keith's mom had literally tortured him leaked out. Friends would tell about how Keith's mom poured salt in Keith's eyes and stuff like that. It was demented. It took me years to think about it fully, but I began to realize that Keith probably didn't have the easiest time with life. He took that out on me. The older I get the more okay with it I am. As I think about it, most of the kids who made fun of me came from broken homes, single parent situations, abuse fathers, etc. Not that their actions against me are justified, but they're certainly more understandable and forgivable in that light.

The point is this, my friends: We're all products of our environments. Keith made fun of me because it's how he expressed his anguish. His friends followed suit. I'm a product of those actions too. Again, this doesn't make all of our actions acceptable or exempt us from responsibility, but it seems to lighten the load a bit.

I was talking to one of my friends about judgment in a Christian setting the other day while we were riding in the car. I ended up telling her my story about Keith and then asking her, "Was Keith a sinner? When Keith picked on me, can he be held responsible and judged for it?" You know, I don't know the answer to that question, but for me it illuminates something about the way a lot of us Christian people think and a lot about why people don't like us. We're quick to judge. We don't think a lot before we pass judgment. We don't realize that the evil deeds don't just crop up in this world. They're conditioned and created by other evil deeds. That makes me question a lot about what's traditionally thought of as "God's judgment," which inevitably is a euphemism for our judgment in God's name. I just want to put that out there. Maybe we'll all think a bit more before we pass judgment. Maybe we'll be a bit quicker to forgive next time.

Two Things...

First, I'd like a bit of discussion and hopefully some thoughtful replies. Second, some awesome entertainment.

So firstly, I've been pondering in my head the extent to which difference breeds hatred. Particularly in the political realm, I find myself having a very difficult time learning that those who are different than me have validity. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I've thought out my arguments or that I'm just an egotistical jerk (as I often can be without my knowledge), but when it comes to people who have different political opinions, specifically to people who are staunch conservatives, I find myself having a difficult time not letting that get difference get in the way I view them as humans.

Example.

I have a friend whom I love deeply. She's a beautiful person who cares about the same things that I do in praxis, but she recently confessed to me that she's an intense conservative. She thinks laissez faire capitalism is the best possible system, socialist nations are filled with unhappy and unhealthy people (she also equated socialism with communism), and that Regan's economic policies were the best thing this country has ever seen. As much as I love her, this is a pretty glaring difference in our perspectives and I just don't know how to 1) communicate with her at all about it and 2) not let it get in the way of how I see her as a human being. For me, these issues touch on my faith in God, my love of my neighbor, and everything I think is wrong with humanity today. How do you do it, guys? How do you not let difference breed hatred? I'm assuming it starts with a strong and healthy dose of humility, though I'm wary of getting to the point that I delegitimize myself in the process, but then what? Yikes!

Okay, now for some promised entertainment. To my friend who is Blogging Incognito, I think your son might particularly enjoy these videos.

Lovers of the Poor...

Lovers of the Poor
By Gwendolyn Brooks

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You'd better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault
Anew and dearly in the innocence
With which they baffle nature. Who are full,
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor--passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is--something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle's bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
But it's all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they're told,
Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
Note homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left,
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars
Must presently restore them. When they're done
With dullards and distortions of this fistic
Patience of the poor and put-upon.
They've never seen such a make-do-ness as
Newspaper rugs before! In this, this "flat,"
Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich
Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered . . . ),
Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.
Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,
In horror, behind a substantial citizeness
Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.
Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-
Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .
They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin "hangings,"
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies'
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!--
Where loathe-lover likelier may be invested.
Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

-1960

The more things change, the more they stay the same, no?

This poem makes me angry. I find myself very flustered with the self-righteous; those who want to help, but only "the worthy poor. The very very worthy and beautiful poor." Really, all that I see in most instances of people wanting to help the poor is that people want to feel better about themselves for having helped the poor but get disgusted by the barbarity of the problem, by how much it actually requires of you to interject and make a difference (myself included). So I suppose I'm upset not only because I see this kind of self-righteousness happening all the time, but because it touches on something in myself that I find loathsome.

I think we tell ourselves lots of things to avoid reaching out and helping people. "I'm far too busy right now," or "the problem's just too big for one person to make a difference in," or - the most insidious lie, "If they could just pull themselves up from their bootstraps!" How can you pull yourself up from your bootstraps if you don't have any boots? I'm just so frustrated by the poverty issue in the world, and particularly by our own egotistical perspective on it.

Life Without God...

There have been several posts by my friends over at Every Square Inch which have stated, both explicitly and implicitly, that without God (and I'm assuming that they mean also without Christ) life can have no meaning. I'm not entirely sure what they mean by this as there are several different possibilities for application of that statement, but in any case I strongly disagree. I've been debating with them on their blog, but I wanted to take some time to really explicate myself and state my case in hopes that 1) I'll create some good dialogue, and 2) they'll understand me a bit better than they do currently.

So...

If you want to say that life has no meaning without God, I think there are two basic ways you can apply that statement. First, there is the ontological argument that without God, life as a phenomena cannot be meaningful (or, from a Christian perspective, that life cannot even exist). In this case, people who are living without God in their lives CAN have meaning, but they're in a sense "borrowing" it from God and not recognizing it. They're taking meaning from God's creation meant for them and not giving God the credit. I'm okay with this argument (I think it's the most tenable in an argument for sure), but I'm not entirely sure this is what most Christians mean when they say things like, "Without God, life can have no meaning."

The second way this phrase can be applied is on the personal, everyday level. Thus, when you're saying that without God life is meaningless, you're saying that without a personal relationship with God (and Christ implicitly) a person cannot be fulfilled. The argument here as I understand it is that we all have a "God shaped hole" and that we are not realizing ourselves as fully human unless we put God back in our lives where He belongs. I think this position is on some level convincing, but here's what you've got to do to hold it:

1) You have to show how people without God (and without Christ specifically) don't have meaning in their lives. More specifically, you have to find people without a relationship with God and Christ who are perfectly happy and successful in the "meaning making department," if you will, and convince them that they actually DON'T have meaning somehow. To me, this either makes the person who is trying to argue that life without God is meaning look either inhumane in some way (they're trying to make people feel guilty or unhappy without cause), silly (they're out of touch with reality), or you'll find yourself deflating the term "meaning" to something...well...meaningless that nobody really cares about or wants in their lives.

What's even more compelling for me in this case is that you've got to make this argument for not only extreme secularists (Dawkins et. al) but also for those who are active participants in other religions. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. cannot have meaning under this framework. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time looking at people like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and telling them that their lives aren't meaningful. As humanitarian and compassionate as they are, I think again we run the risk of devaluing the term "meaningful" to be something no one really cares about or wants in their lives.

2) You have to argue against post-modern existentialist philosophy. Wow. That's tough, especially seeing as it's unnecessary. There are lots of fantastic Christian existential philosophers who have already done the leg-work that these guys are wanting to do (Kierkegaard and Tillich specifically come to mind) and they do it in a post-modern and therefore more currently understandable, accessible, and acceptable by the everyday thinking person. Anyway, what you've got to do, in my mind, is argue somehow that there is no relativity in human experience and the power of human agency to decide what is meaningful and what is not is a misguided notion. I'm not entirely sure how to do this without looking either archaic or fideistic.

So there are my thoughts, for what they're worth, and I'd LOVE to get some feedback. As it stands, I think the onus is on a believer in the statement "Life can have no meaning without God" and want to hold that position on an everyday level to explain how 1) people who seem to have meaning without God DON'T have it, and 2) rebut existentialism. I'd really like to see that argument.

As an addendum, I think that we're better off leaving accepting the fact that life can have meaning without God. I don't want to say that all meanings are the same and that having any meaning at all means that you're completely fulfilled and happy. I'd argue that a personal relationship with the Divine makes you more fully human, more realized, and more fulfilled than you could otherwise be (i.e. that having a relationship with the Divine is part of our nature and we should embrace it), but there are lots of negative things about rejecting meaning without God. It in some sense dehumanizes us and rejects the notions of free will that the Bible says we're created with, mainly, and I don't think I can accept that consequence. When we're totally free, when we can freely choose to accept God over and against the other things in the world, our choice is MORE meaningful than it would be without meaning in other departments. I think that saying life can have meaning without God actually makes the choice to worship God a more valuable and laudable choice than it would be otherwise. What do you all think?

Some Recent Thoughts...

You know, I'm not really upset that I don't post often anymore. It's not that I'm not posting because I don't have things to say or I don't want to be part of this online community I've worked years to cultivate and be a member of. I'm not posting because I'm out doing things. I'm living my life. I'm dancing, or studying, or hanging out with my friends, or at church, or something like that. I'm completely okay with that.

That being said, there have been some incredible things going on in my life recently.

Last weekend, for example, I was in Kansas City to watch my first ever professional ballet (strange, I know). My friend Valerie and I wanted to go ever since we found out about it at the beginning of the year and we discovered we could get student rush tickets for $12 the day of the show, so we drove up together and spent the night with her sister and brother-in-law. The show was fantastic even with my critical eye pouring all over them.

Strangely, my favorite part wasn't even the mainstage production, Carmen, but the shows which were supposed to build up to it. There was one piece, Splendid Isolations III, which was simply breathtaking. I teared up in the middle. It was a ten minute contemporary piece about a man and a woman who were deeply in love but they couldn't seem to reach each other. This distance between them was symbolized in the dance by a parachute-like dress which extended ten feet in either direction. They used the dress in some, well, splendid ways to represent the issue and how the couple was dealing with it and she finally took it off at the end for a gorgeous finalle pas de deux. Amazing. And a great intro into the foyer of professional dance productions for me.

Yesterday in dance class my instructor was trying to explain a concept using analogies from old children's tv shows.
"You guys have to be like Gumby," she said.
"Who's Gumby?" responded the eight tiny dancer girls in the room as I smacked my forehead, confounded.
"Okay, be like Stretch Armstrong. You guys know who that is, right?"
"No." Another forehead smack.
"Alright," she said in a moment of I-swear-I'm-not-this-old frustration. "Who do you guys know from movies or tv shows that is really stretchy?"
"How about Elastagirl from The Incredibles?" tweeted the audience of what I was now seeing as babies.
"Elastagirl it is." One more forehead smack on my part, just because I'm starting to really understand one more part of growing up, and I'm only 21. Yikes. This is only going to get worse, isn't it?

Yesterday I deleted over 300 friends from my Facebook. It was a strange experience. I'm not sure if people who grew up without the internet as part of their upbringing appreciate how central to our identities some of these websites can become. I've had a Facebook page since I was 17. I've had the same email and instant messenger since I was 11. These things grew up with me. I think on some level, they disperse our personal identity to be something online as well as something we carry with us. At the very least, these things are a symbol of our material selves; they're something we understand our material selves and our relations to other material selves through, which has some pretty profound implications.

Anyway, I was going through my list of what was then 894 friends. *Click* Another high school mate is dismissed from being associated with me. *Click* There goes that girl I had a crush on for a few weeks but haven't talked to in two years. *Click, click, click* An old professor, a fellow blogger I never talk to, someone I met at my sister's wedding. It's really strange, but every click is a decision to let go of a part of myself in some way or other. Each person dismissed from the status of Facebook "friend" is something I have to reflect upon and ask myself, "Is this person still representative of myself as I am today?" It was a nice experience ultimately. I do feel lighter now, more clarified, more solidified.

That's really all for now. More later! For now, I have to finish up my fall break, which includes three papers, a test to study for, and two books to finish. Fall break, indeed!

On Being Perfect...

I struggle with being perfect. I have my whole life. I want so badly to not make mistakes, to cross every "t" and dot every "i," and I pummel myself with hatred and disgust when I screw up.

I'm not sure if there are many others out there like myself who find themselves filled with a deep-seated desire to never fail at anything. "Perhaps when we finally get it right," we tell ourselves, "we'll feel complete at last." Maybe that's true, but we'll never know. We'll never reach that point.

I was dancing last night, learning new choreography for the upcoming Nutcracker performance, and when I screwed up (which is inevitable in ballet) I hung my head and walked off the floor in the middle of the rehearsal. I couldn't handle the shame I felt first at not being able to live up to the unreal standard I had set for myself and second at the way I reacted to my failure. It was an eye-opening moment for me.

I've been having these discussions with people for the past few weeks. I'm quick to forgive others for their shortcomings or their failures, yet when it comes to myself I cannot let anything go. I'm relentless in my masochistic attacks.

I feel like if I can figure out this perfection thing I'll finally be worthy of the love I get from those around me. Until then, I'm a constant disappointment to people who think highly of me, "for," I tell myself, "all they're really looking up to is the fake me. If they knew how terrible of a person I really am, they'd surely reject me outright." This goes for all of my relationships. My friends, my ballet instructors, and God. Until I can figure out how to be perfect, all I want to do is remove myself from these relationships because I know I'll continually disappoint everyone I come into contact with.

Yikes! That's a dead-end street, isn't it? What's missing from this picture, I believe, is forgiveness and an understanding of what it means to be a human being (not to mention a proper view of what a healthy human relationship looks like). My problem now is that I'm not quite sure how to reach that goal.

My Life Till Now...

"My Life Till Now" was the title one of my best friends made for a note on facebook which described, well, her life until now. On Tuesday, you see, her mom died after a long and hard fought battle with lung cancer. I'd been praying for her for months (along with many others), and she was finally relieved of her suffering. I want to start by sharing an excerpt from Kristen's note, because I think it's really well put and it brings me several different forms of hope. She writes:

[ All I can say is "Thank you". Thank you Mommy for being such a wonderful, gentle, selfless soul. You've taught me so much in the 21 years I've known you. I hope that eventually I can be just as good of a servant to others as you were to me and our family. Thank you to all my friends; you've been there for me to cry to, vent to, run to, and be frustrated with life with. Without you this would have been much, much, much harder; not that it has been easy by any means. Also, thanks to people I'd never imagine to care about me so much. You've latched on and never let go, and for that I am so grateful. Lastly, I thank God. My peace and strength ultimately comes from Him. From day one I've been praying for peace in this situation and he's granted that to me through each and every tial, including this one. Without Him, I'd be a total blubbering mess, but with his help and guidance I know it'll be alright and I'm only a half blubbering mess.

Mom, I'll see you later. Everyone else, please keep in mind that the people you love are finite and give them a massive hug while you can. ]

Beautiful, no? So was the funeral, which I attended in Berryville, Arkansas on Saturday morning. The service was fine, but mostly I was just overwhelmed with joy at the thought of being able to be there for a friend in her time of need and repay her a bit for the love and kindness she's showed me.

It makes you think though. We're all going to die. Everyone we ever have known and ever will know. It's tough to deal with, but necessary, I believe, if we're going to live authentically. I know I called up my parents that day and told them I loved them. I even made a trip home a few weeks ago because of this whole situation just to hug my family. How do you deal with death? Does it make you let go of your attachment to life or make you grip it all the more?

Anyway, I've cleared my head a bit in the past few months and I think I'm ready to start making my way back as a writer in the blog-o-sphere for a while. I've got some thoughts I need to get some feedback for, so look for me once more!

On Being White...

I've been at Drury University for four years now. It's a liberal arts school with a strong emphasis on human rights issues in America. In my mind, that's probably the most valuable thing I've learned about while being here. Still, that doesn't make it easy. I'm currently in African American Literature reading abolitionist writers (W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, etc) and it's really hard for me to do. Let me tell you why.

I'm white. I'm a while MALE. AND I'm in the middle class. Basically, I embody everything that has been wrong with this country since its inception. I'm not overtly racist, classist, or gender biased, but that doesn't mean that I'm not currently benefiting from hundreds of years of gruesome acts of hatred based on race, class, and gender. All of that makes me feel very conflicted.

Du Bois talks about the concept of double consciousness. He says that when he realized that he was different from everyone, when he realized he was black, he suddenly became aware of the fact that he had two separate identities struggling to take supremacy over his character. He was both an African and an American, and that created a veil between him and the outside world while he simultaneously waged war with himself over how to successfully integrate his two identities.

When we were talking about that in class, my professor rhetorically asked, "When did you discover that you were white?" Even though it was a rhetorical question, I answered him.

"Freshman year of college for me," I said. You see, even though I knew about racism and had heard of all the bad things associated with it, I was SEVERELY sheltered from it until I came to Springfield. My high school had next to no diversity whatsoever, so I lived my life thinking that I was merely a white male living in a time when racism had had its influence on history and now it only existed in small pockets of America and the minds of small people. When I came to Drury and started reading civil rights writings, feminist thought, philosophy, theology, I began to see things very differently. Suddenly I was doubly conscious of two very different identities within me.

I have my white, middle class male side which I am not acutely familiar with. This is who I am and who I must learn to take responsibility for being but not who I want to be. Alternatively, I have my meek, shy, scared little boy side who just wants everyone to get along and love each other. I don't know how to reconcile myself. I want to totally decry the role that middle class, white men have played in the history of the world, but I AM one.

It's also difficult to try and make that point in class discussions. What usually ends up happening is I'll start to try and make the point but end up looking like a whiny racist, sexist, classist man. I feel as though there is no way I can make the point that I'm not racist or sexist despite my appearances and cultural heritage. It just seems to me that even by those who champion justice, often times we still make judgments based on color and gender.