Author: Samuel Hull

Coming to the last post in the semester, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the things I’ve learned. I haven’t been comfortable to actually really share any of the things that I’ve written for this, and I kinda feel like they’re a personal expression of something that helps me improve as a person and better understand myself. I don’t really feel like that needs to be something I share with the world, especially because I find myself wondering what my personal anecdotes in the form of poetry would do to actually solve any injustices.

At the very best, the work I’ve done has made me want to strive to improve as a person. I know myself and I know that I need to do a better job of practicing what I preach, so when I look back on things that I wrote from the heart, and I can clearly see the many ways which I don’t live up to my own standard for the way I believe that a person should act if they seek a moral life. Identifying this has in turn helped me identify ways in which I can strive to improve. For one, I know that I need to be much better with political activism, even if it’s a slow buildup from things like writing letters to representatives and attending protests for causes I believe to be just. I think that my failures to do this are a result of my isolation and focus on my own immediate troubles in my own immediate bubble, and I think that stepping out of this bubble of self to actively strive to help others is something that can give life meaning.

This is the week I struggled the most with. I’d say that for better or for worse, I am a very opinionated person. I’d also say that for better or worse, I am a very passionate person. I can be argumentative and angrily dismissive of things when I disagree with them or involve viewpoints that I have a tendency to look down upon. Something I never want to do is virtue signal, but when I’m trying to express advocacy for social justice issues, it gets a little harder. It’s hard for me to advocate for these things without using my extreme frustration with the other side’s racism, sexism, and discriminatory/borderline sadistic policy choices. Even writing this, I get emotional and heated and want to use my negativity as my fuel. This is what made writing this week so difficult.

When it came down to it, I kind of realized that expressing advocacy for causes against injustice simply cannot be separated from directly opposing the source of the injustice. In retrospect, this should’ve been blatantly obvious, but I guess with writing this as a poetry project for a class that’s meant to be bipartisan shouldn’t be too politically charged, but I’m glad I’ve learned to more honestly and accurately represent my views and alliance with the marginalized.

In my international politics class, we talk a lot about humanitarian crises throughout the world, and it got me thinking a lot about how many of us are guilty of dissociating from the suffering of others across the world simply because it does not actively affect us and is so far away. I wanted to express this. I never want to strongly express things in the form of resentment and negativity when it’s possible to advocate for change. Of course, this is really difficult at times, but I think that’s a part of being human and trying to improve for the better.

When I started writing this time, I wanted to convey the positives. I wanted to provide examples of the truly amazing things we are capable of when we work together and show empathy for everyone around the world. Additionally, I wanted to express the conflict I felt on the matter and how it makes me feel. By trying to write honestly and realistically, I want to convey the message that failures to be always do the best thing are completely part of being human, and when we refuse to talk about these failures, we isolate from each other. I feel like this stigmatizes honesty about our shortcomings and makes it harder to outright admit weakness and ask for help to improve. I realize this kinda strayed away from the initial problem I wanted to tackle, but like I said, I want to write honestly. This is the direction that my brain veered into because it’s an issue that is very close to my heart, and tends to be at the forefront of my mind. I think all it really takes is learning to create a balance.

After some thinking, I decided that the poetry I would write would be more aimed with a social justice message or a message surrounding some advocacy for change. I figured it best to continue along the course of using it as an expression of some inner conflict regarding something in today’s world that frustrates me. I started by brainstorming a little, trying to think of the thing that bothered me most. This took a little longer than I had anticipated, but narrowing down a long list of grievances takes some time.

The first thing I wanted to express dissatisfaction with is the competitiveness of modern American society. I began to reflect on how we are conditioned from a very early age to compete against each other, and I believe that the modern school system actively encourages this. Not only do I feel like this creates a hostile environment for learning students, I think it seeps into every aspect of our society and makes us less empathetic as people overall. When we focus exclusively on competing with each other, we stop thinking about the feelings of others. While this doesn’t mean everyone you meet and all your friends and you are sociopaths, I think it just makes us more self-oriented as a society when in reality we should be lifting each other up and lending support to those who need it.

When I got writing, I didn’t have too hard of a time articulating this, but being anything less than explicit, even with dumb metaphors, was hard. It made my writing seem self important and pretentious when that was the exact opposite of what I’m trying to convey. In the future I’ll try to focus more on optimism to seem less like a pretentious edgy college teenager.