April Blog

This goes with number 13 from the Tell Tale Heart questions.

Many times I have heard people say something like, "Eww, you're gay." Then in turn the other person says, "No your gay, why would you say something like that..." None the less you see people project themselves regularly upon others. It's something that I am even guilty of. I know this kid, I'll just say that he's from the South. I would always ask him why he hated me. His response would always be "I don't hate you." It always suprised me that he didn't hate me because Lord knows that I hated him. I had thought that the feeling was mutual, but now that I look back at it, I suppose that I was really projecting my hate, so I only thought that he hated me in my mind. Of course he could have been lying to me and really did hate me, I'll never know.

My life experience is strikingly similar to that in the "Tell Tale Heart". Except the narrator says that he loves the old man. Was there ever anything evil with the old man's eye? Of course not, I mean it doesn't work properly so for that reason it could be considered evil, but not in a true sense. Instead of saying that there was something wrong with himself, the narrator finds something ugly, the eye, to project his ugliness on.

So why would me and the narrator do something like this? After a little thinking, the only answer that I can really think of is that I would not like to think of myself as an ugly person. So when I found out that something ugly was inside of me, hate in this case, I did everything to convince myself that I am not ugly (I've been using ugly for lack of a better word.) So, because it was not possible that I could have been the ugly one, I said that he was and therefore projected my feelings of resentment. The same thing must have happened to the narrator, he thought that there was no way that he could have been evil, so he said that the eye was.

Anyway, I feel really stupid that I could be so immature as to project my feelings on someone else. I just need to stop and realize that I can be an ugly person and that it's okay because everyone has some amount of ugliness in them.

March Monthly Connection

Does someone deserve to die if they take the life of another person? When I first looked at this question, my immediate thought was, yes, of course they do it seems fair. That person took away someone elses right to live, so they should lose their right. This is one reason why things are kind of strange here in the US. If someone were to commit murder, then admit to it, they are completely exempt from the death penalty. Is this completely fair? The only way that someone is put to death in this country is if there is some small possible chance that they are indeed innocent. Then of course there are many criminals walking the street right now because we have lawyers who find loop holes and technicalities to let them walk free.



What goes on in the US Courts today is completely different from what happened in the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus where the main character, Meursault, admits to murdering a man and is then given the death penalty. There is even a chance that Meursault may be a little crazy. He doesn't really care about the things around him and feels no emotion towards his mother's death. Had he been an American in our society today, there is no way that he would have been killed, everyone would instead say that he is mentally ill. Funny how the system in the novel should be primative compared to ours when it is justifiable.

January Monthly Connection

One of my biggest problems with society today are people who victimize themselves and complain yet refuse to do anything to make their situation better. An example are people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton . They make livings by suppressing black people rather than lifting "their people". Anyways, racism is dying in the US, but people like Jackson and Sharpton are still living like it's Alabama in the 1960s. The bottom line is that neither of them would have a job if they didn't suppress African Americans (aka "their people"). While there are people like Sharpton and Jackson who complain that African Americans are not treated equally (which makes no sense because look at Obama but like I said they still think that it is Alabama in the 60s), there are people like Lorraine C. Miller who I have had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with several times. Rather than having some sort of chip on her shoulder (like Jackson and Sharpton) and complain that it is impossible to get anywhere in her life because of her race and gender, Ms. Miller doesn't even take these things into consideration and shows that she can do what any white male can do by being the Clerk of the House.

Many extreme feminists, (the ones who believe way more than the basic idea that women can do anything men can do) are much like Jackson and Sharpton. They suppress themselves rather than lift themselves complaining that they are treated so unfair. So rather than going out and working harder, they make excuses on why they can't. This relates to the novel The Awakening. If Kate Chopin suppresses her main character Edna. To me, this means that Chopin was your typical feminist, all talk and do nothing (well she did write the book, I'll give her that). The Awakening is not viewed as one woman over coming her obstacles, instead it is one woman losing to society. Whenever Edna was beaten down she should have came back stronger and worked harder.

This is what I think feminism should be about. Women should work harder and make no excuses for themselves. If things do not go a specific way, they should take the time to readjust their angle and try again. Women who do not do anything but complain about how unfair their lives are and how men have it made are not true feminists, the true feminists are the women out there earning the respect from men that they are entitled to.