Howl

I saw the best of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking of an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the Machinery of the night.  Some of them bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw dreams of Arkansas and angels.  Other drank drugs and remains in unshaved rooms in their underwear, burning the things that made food possible for them.  Some of them made connections in white padded rooms, while other waited for Moloch to collect a sacrifice.

                Howl by Allen Ginsberg comes off as critique of his whole generation, while also understanding it.  He sounds disappointed by what has happened to it, but understands how they got to that point.  It is like you and your friend has an addiction to the same drug, but you are able to pull yourself out of it, but you see that your friends are still following self-destruction.  You are disappointed, but you understand why they can’t stop.  It also feels like a collection of experiences and actions that Ginsberg has gone through. “Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness” seems like when the generation became decadent in comparison to lines like “Burning their money in wastebaskets.  It also sounds like they were trying to disconnect from the system.  “Who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow towards lonesome farms.”  While part one sounds like a description of the hipster/beatnik generation, the second part deals with Moloch, who is an ancient Semitic God.  He is usually involved with child sacrifice, but most of the time he is used as a presentation of something that requires a costly sacrifice.  By using Moloch as a god figure, is Ginsberg saying that for his generation to receive the perception and outlook they have acquired, they had to sacrifice their own personal future and placement in society?  The last section deals with Ginsberg and his friendship with Carl Solmen, who he meets in a mental hospital.  Solomen and Ginsbergs both entered of their own free will and start to talk about their experiences.  Ginsberg felt sympathy for Solomen, who related his experiences to him, such as throwing potato salad at lecturers on Dadaism.

(Sidenote: I also found this video that I think is amusing, which is a ......companion piece, I don't really know what to call it, a howl for the modern age?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UowVsL3dXjM

Harrison and Equality

     In the future everyone is equal and they don’t have a choice.  It is against the law to have any advantages over anyone.  There are even agents of The United States Handicapper General that disable everyone.  If you are too smart, they put limiters on your mind.  If you think something too advance, then they destroy it.  The limits also extend to the physical.  If you are too beautiful, you have to put on a mask that makes you ugly.  Too big or strong, 300 pound weights for you!  For George and Hazel things are….average.  But they had a child called Harrison.  Harrison was seven feet and was more advance then everyone else, but that means he had more disabilities then everyone else.  He was recently taken away and Hazel was crying about it.  But because of the handicaps could not remember what she was crying about.  They were watching ballerinas on the television.  Because of the handicaps they could not perform to their greatest ability.  You could tell the one that is the most beautiful because she had the heaviest weights and a horrible mask.  Hazel thinks it would be a joy to hear all those sounds that the Agents send into people’s head to destroy their thoughts.  She thinks she would make a good Hanicape general.  Hazel even looked like the General, Diana Moon Glampers.  Just then George start to think of his abnormal son in a positive manner, but the 21 gun salute that was in his head stopped that.  In a news builitin their son was brought up on the screen, saying that he broke oout of jail and was warned not to try to reason with him.  Then Harrison showed up at the studio, tearing the hinges off the door.  His footsteps sounding like a earthquake.  George reconized that it was his son, bit the sound of an automobile in his head caused a pain that closed his eyes.  When they were open again, the picture of Harrison was replaced by the geniue article.  Harrison tore off his restraits and he declared himself Emperor.  He asked for a mate and the beautiful Ballerina stood up.  He removed her restrains and they dance.  But Diana Moon Glampers came through some doors and shot both of them dead.

Things taken to a logical extreme as a joke or a social commentary are most of the time funny.  But if it is applied in real life, then it becomes horrible, because logical extremes don’t take into account emotions or innovations.  Logical extremes give no compromise, no middle ground and human beings usually have middle ground.  Equality is wonderful, without equality I wouldn’t be able to write this paper or be in college.  But our differences make us who we are.  Completion betters humanity as a whole.  If we all had the exact same abilities, then we wouldn’t move forward as a race.  We would in a way become stale.  But even the world of the Handicappers is not equal.  Someone would have to be smarter or stronger then everyone else to enforce the system.  If not then the system probably could not be enforced.  But then again I could be wrong.  George and Hazel birthed Harrison under these conditions and he had super strength and was a genius.  He might have been the next step in human evolution, but everyone had to be equal and for that he got a shotgun shell to him, all in the name of equality.  But I wonder why he automatically made himself Emperor and if he didn’t do that would he still be 

Poor Francis....

     Francis Macomber and his wife Margot are on a hunting trip in Africa, with their Guide Wilson.  They have been on one hunt on this trip and things have not gone well for Francis, mainly because faced with a lion, ran instead of shot.  While the people who were at the camp thought he did well, the gun bearers, Margot and Wilson knew the truth.  After wards Margot started to notice certain things about Wilson, his sandy hair, his cold blue eyes.   Francis was a very fit, well-built man.  While they were having drinks Francis thanks Wilson for the lion, but Margot looks away in shame towards Wilson.  “You have a very red face, Mr. Wilson she said.  Drink Wilson says but she says I don’t think so, Francis drinks a great deal, but his face is never red.  Its red today, Francis said trying to joke.  NO my face is red today says Margot.  Soon Margot ran off to cry.  Francis expected this and Wilson found it to be an annoyance.  Wilson considered Francis to be a boy and Margot to be a predator.  She came back and was refresh and new.  Margot wanted to come on the next trip, but Wilson was against it.  Wilson knew about American Women and their effect on men, so she saw her as trouble.  But in the end she got her way.  In the afternoon they went to hunt Impala and Francis proved himself to be a great shot.  He wanted to make sure that his wife forgot the lion business, because they were hunting buffalo.  But Wilson thought to himself that he should be more worried about how being a coward affected himself, not his wife.  But there was another lion near the camp, so there was another chance.  Francis came close, even shot the lion couple of times, but in the end ran, with his wife seeing the whole thing again.  When they got back in the cat Margot lend over into the front seat and kissed Wilson.  Francis has been through this before, but Wilson thought that it was their business and he was a 3^rd party.  The night Margot went to Wilson’s tent and Francis confronted her about it when she got back.  He said “you think I will take anything” and she said “I know you will”.  They were at a stalemate, she was beautiful and he was rich.  Wilson had been through this before and thought nothing of it.  In the morning they went off to hunt three buffalo.  The chased them on foot and in the car.  Francis took out the biggest one, while both he and Wilson took out the other two.  The chase had awakened something in Francis and now he had the courage to stand up to his wife, maybe even leave her!  One of the Gun Bears spoke to Wilson, telling him that the first buffalo was still alive and limped off into the Bush.  So they decided to go after it and finish it off.  They were close to it when it decided to charge.  Francis took several shots most of them hitting the horn, until he got it in the head.  But at the same time Francis felt a white hot blinding flash explode in his head.  It was the last thing he ever felt; because his wife had accidently shot him while trying to help.  Wilson said to her, without a tone in his voice, “That was a pretty thing to do, He would have left you too”  “why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England” all she did was cried and said stop it.

                Yeah So I really don’t like Margot, Francis wife.  Because of her Francis died. (I was like the hunter, starting like Francis at the end of the story.  He was starting to come into his own and standing up to his wife and then BLAM, end of character development. (Well I should have expected that since the story was named The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, but I was hoping for a metaphysical death.)  Also I think the title references his life after he discovers himself, not before.  After his transformation, Wilson was his guide.  Francis asked him questions like “Do you have feelings of happiness about what’s going to happen?” in regards to the hunt.  As for the wife, she take an interesting turn when Macomber changes in regards to the hunt.  At first she was excited to see it, but after Macomber develops she is sicken by it.  I think she was looking Wilsion in the previous hunts, not the actual action.  Wilson himself I don’t really find fault with, he just trying to do his job, he doesn’t expect to see these people again, so he has no need to make an attachment to them.  But at the same time he is proud to see Macomber grow into what he considers to be a man.  I think he considers most American men to be like children, mainly because they don’t normal grow up around danger and since his clients are mostly rich, they haven’t been through much struggle.  But I do find it curious with many cultures that the right into manhood involves conflict or death.  The only peaceful passage into manhood I can think of off the top of my head is a Bar mitzvah and the only painful thing I can think of happening there is the boy falling out of the chair.  Why does the rite of manhood have to involve someone getting hurt or a creature dying when it is displayed in our culture?  Good Job boy you just ended a creature’s life for no apparent reason other than to prove to me a concept of manhood, Great Job.  I mean there are other means to show you’re a “man” like joining the armed forces (you won’t automatically kill someone in the armed forces, but it is still indirectly involved with violence).  The other way you can look at is that the hunt is a metaphor of him finally taking a stand against his wife, no matter what the consequences.  There is also the question whether not the wife committed murder, but I believe that she didn’t that it was an accident.  I’m pretty sure that is the only positive thing I can say about the wife.

A good man is hard to find.

The Grandmother was hoping to go to East Tennessee, not Florida and she wanted to change her only son, Bailey, mind.  She tries to scare him by showing him an article about the recent breakout of a criminal called “The Misfit” implying that he is heading towards Florida.  She says that she would never take her kids near a state that has a madman heading towards it.  Bailey just ignored her and kept reading his paper.  She then tries to appeal to the mother, saying that the kids were to Florida before, but not East Tennessee.  Her motives to wanting to go to East Tennessee didn’t lie with the happiness of the family, but that she had friends up there.  Bailey’s son, John Wesley asked why don’t she just stay home if she doesn’t want to go, with his sister saying, She has to go everywhere we go.  Next morning, Grandmother was the first one in the car with the Cat hidden a valise.  She didn’t want to leave the cat alone, afraid that it might kill itself.  She dressed fancy for the trip, because if she had died in a crash, at least the passersby will be able to identify her as a lady.  Like some mothers, she constantly gave advice to her son while driving, about patrolmen and other things. John wanted to drive through Georgia fast so that they won’t have to look at much.  The grandmother tasks about respect for their home state and parents, then points out a pickaninny standing in the door of a shack.  She tells them a story about a little nigger boy who ate a watermelon under a misunderstanding.  They stopped at a place to eat and the children misbehaved.  The grandmother talked to the owner of the dinner about the way things are and how they used to be.  She blames Europe.   After leaving, the grandmother wanted to visit an old house, but Bailey didn’t want to, so she got the children to get on her side and eventually he gave in.  They went down a dirt road and had a accident.  Everyone turned out to be ok.  Soon they waited in a ditch for help, when a car pulled up.  Three men got out of the car with guns, one of them shirtless with a black hat.  The grandmother identifies him as The Misfit out loud.  He said she wish she had not done that.  Slowly one by one the family was taken out ot the woods to be shoot until the grandmother was left.  She keeps trying to save her own life, until she mistakes the Misfit for her son (because he is now wearing his shirt).  She reaches up to touch his face and he recoils and shoots her in the chest

     Ok, so I will admit I didn’t see the story ending that way.  If this story was dated sometime after 1970s, then as soon as they mentioned The Misfit, I would have expected him to show up at some time.  Instead I just expected the grandmother to get her comeuppance or the family learning some sort of lesson.  Since it was written in 1955 I was expecting something like Leave it to Beaver.  I guess it is because the experience I have from the 1950s is about the Civil rights Movement or it’s television programs.  I wasn’t expecting the whole family to get killed one by one.  But this story brings up several subversions about respecting your elders and Christianity.  Just because one get older, does not mean that the get wiser.  It is a problem in churches, especially southern churches that has the ideal that just because someone has been in the church for a long time it means that they know better or should be given more respect because of it.  The grandmother expects respect because of who she is, but she doesn’t give respect to the wishes of her child, manipulating her Grandchildren into what will indirectly lead to their deaths.  If she just went along with her son’s wishes, they would be alive.  On the other hand she couldn’t have known that they would have meet The Misfit, but when they did she had the choice not to identify him, but she did.  If she respected her son’s wishes and left the cat at home like a smart person, then the crash wouldn’t have happened.  I’m also interested in a point that The Misfit brings up.  He was made that he wasn’t there when Jesus raised Lazurus from the dead.  He wanted proof that Jesus did this and was mad at Jesus for not leaving proof of his existence.  While I can understand his anger about the ambiguity of Christianity because of this (He refuses to see a man that he dosen’t know if he exists as his savior)  If there was facts that Jesus did what he did, then Christianity wound run on faith and it would be a spiritual belief.  Oh and I also like that this was written by a Christian too, who decided to explore certain aspects about her belief 

Theme and Harlem

So you have to write a paper that will come out of you, so that it will be true.  But the truth for one person might be different than another person, especially if the races between the people are different.  Your perspective changes when you are the minority in your class room.  People might expect things from you that you refuse to live up to.  But when you are 22, your identity might still be forming.  Hughes likes to eat, sleep, drink and be in love and he would also like a pipe for Christmas or records.  But just because he is colored, dos not put him in the position not to like something just because he is black.  Because the paper must come out of him, will the paper also be black, or will it be white, so that it can connect with the teacher, who is also white?  Maybe the teacher does not want to be a part of a black man in college.  But they learn from each other and one is more free then the other.

What happens when a dream is not fulfilled?  Not a dream likes “I’m going to conquer the sea
 or anything like that.  But a concert dream?  Can it be easily forgotten or does it become a weight.  It can’t just pop off like a hair.  It can be like sugar, dried up meat, or rotten meat or does it explode? Either way it is going to leave a mark.

Harlem and Theme for English B deal with different subject matter.  “Theme” has to deal with what is considered truth between the races.. While someone could say that since both races can go to school together their truths about school should be the same since they are equal now.  But that might not be true.  If both went for tutoring, would both receive equal treatment from the teacher?  Since both students live in different environments, how does each one perceive there environment?  Can we all really perceive what another man perceives as truth and do we want to, especially if that other person’s truth might limit us.   Harlem deals with dreams and what happens when we can’t live up to them.  We all dream of something, whether it is a family or a certain job, when we can’t gain that dream, it will affect us, especially when we get older.  Oh we can say that we are fine settling for our number two job or dream, but it weighs on us.  Thoughts sometimes goes through our head such as “what could I have done differently “ or “ if it wasn’t for (blank) then I would have my dream.  It could become like dead weight or cause us to lash out and self-destruction.  Actually some people might prefer self-destruction over not have their dream or drag someone else down with them if they are after the same dream.  All the ways that Hughes describes the dream deferred is physical, from drying up to stinking like rotten meat.  These are all things that are difficult to hide, so is he trying to say that you can’t side the effects of a deferred dream and indirectly a broken person?

What is Afirca to a man who was never raised there?  Your ancestors come from there, but besides that how does it relate to you?  Is Africa noisy or is that just the sound of nature?  Are the men Strong and Bronze or regal black?  If one went back to Africa, he or she would have to adapt to it’s ways.  Are the jungle boys and girls like us, just searching for love.  The Imagery is beautiful, but could we deal with the customs, the reality?

When I was younger there was a movement to go back to Africa by the Black culture.  Whether or not it was a call to visit or move back I can’t remember.  Now I could said that when I was a kid I thought the movement was stupid, but I was obsessed over power rangers at the time so that would have been a lie.  But I do think the movement was stupid.  Now I’m not against exploring one’s background, but doing something just because it was a cultural movement is stupid.  If you had a genuine interest in Africa, then go visit, but if your interest is fueled by everyone else doing it then that is bad.  Our culture has changed so much from our time in Africa.  We have mostly adopted the Christan God, as a group know very little about our “homeland” and would probably take a long time to adapt if we could.  We call ourselves African-Americas, but it really just a title.  Cullen consider the Gods of Africa to be Heathens and he has no need for them.  But then Cullen identifies God as not black (“Wishing He I served were Black”)  So what does that say about him?

I Marvel

(Instead of a summary of the poem, I’m just going to repeat instead)    I Doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind and did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is Baited by the fickle fruit, declare If Merely a brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair.  Inscrutable His ways are and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand.  Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black and bid him sing!

If man asked God why he did so many things and I covered them all then I would have a really long blog!  But I’ll just cover this poem instead.  The main question Countee asks is what is God’s reasoning behind his choices and brings to light one of the most innocent questions usually asked by kids about God, If God is good then why does he let bad things happen.  Now one could argue about free will and choice, but that would be getting off topic of the work at hand.  The first half of the poem is asking questions, the one I find interesting is the one involving Tantalus, one of the many characters in Greek mythology.  Tantalus was invited to eat at the Gods table, but he stole ambrosia and nectar to bring to his people (and probably for himself) The thing about ambrosia and nectar is that it made humans like the gods.  The gods did not like this so they put him in the underworld.  I find interesting the Countee puts the reference to Tantlus, who wanted to be immortal, after the line “Why flesh that mirrors Him must die someday”.  Questioning why we must die and why we are punished for trying to attain immortality has a nice duality to it.  He then come to the conclusion that most people just go to, that we can’t understand his ways and that he is always right.

The love song

T.S Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one man’s response to death or someone talking to someone else who is dying for the intro.  The translation of the intro is someone talking to someone else that is about to enter the abyss, since they aren’t coming back.  As for the poem it’s self, it seems to be about a man longing for a relationship.  (Which is about half the guys in college?)  There a line that is repeated through the “stream of consciousness” poem that says “In the room the women come and go, Talking about Michelangelo”.  It seems that the narrator is in his apartment complex, a setting that seems familiar to him.  The narrator describes what is outside, which is a fog that seems to cover all over the city.  Many thought go thorug his head, such as how to prepare his face to meet other faces.  He has a lot of time, time for decisions not to be made, time for visions of what could have been if he had tried.  His insecurities feed into his indecision, asking himself “Do I Dare? Do I Dare?”  He worries about his thinning hair and his attire.  He knows the body of the women that pass by, but can’t approach them.  In the end he is his own worst enemy, he will destroy himself before he even has a chance.

     The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is the thought process of every insecure guy ever born.  But it specifically is the thought process of a middle age man that can’t build up the courage to talk to  women.  Since it is stream of consciousness, the poem comes off as jumbled, but focused on a main topic.  He over thinks every possible interaction that he could possibly have.  Instead of talking to women he plans things, lines 122 and 123 give that feeling.  “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach” Even an action that doesn’t concern women is concerning to him.  He is afraid of his own word “It’s impossible to say what I mean”. Line 84 says “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker” makes the reader aware that the narrator is aware of his own short comings, he admits that he is afraid.  In a way this is a very introverted man.  If it wasn’t for the fact that his hair was described as thinning, then the reader could have mistaken the narrator for a teenage boy who is trying to find his way.  You have to wonder if it has always been like this for him or did some event happen to him to turn him to this personality?

The Wasteland

T.S Elliot's The Wasteland is surreal to say the least.  I can't really make a summary of it, but i'll try my best.  The Wasteland is split up into five sections, The burial of the dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death By water and What the Thunder said.  Each section, eventhoguh it deals with different things, seems to be connected.  Burial of the dead speaks of clairvoyantes and memories of mountains and childhood.  While The Fire Sermon details an encounter between a man and a woman that may or may not be concensual.  These stories seem to detail memories of events.  They seem to be foggy and you only remember certain details, but you sure do remember the feelings.   The Game of chess seems to be linked to The Fire Sermon.

I wil admit this is not the most confusing piece of media i have experience, but it probally in the top ten.  All the sections seems to be connect.  I get the feeling they happen in the same state or atleast nearby each other.  They all speak of an unreal city, which I assume is the setting.  The ambiguity of it brings about some questions such as what was the purpose or was there even suppose to be one.

Huck chapters 23-30

The show that the King and the Duke put on was defiantly not for children.  The Duke took care of the door until the theater couldn’t hold any more men..  He then went to the stage through the back and started to work up the crowd about how this was going to be a great tragedy.  At the point that the crowd couldn’t take anymore, the king came out on all fours, painted with stripes and naked.  The crowd laughed and howled and the Duke dropped the curtain.  He said that they will only be performing for two more nights due to prior engagements.  The crowd, not taking this news well, asked, Is that all?  They were about to cause an riot until one big man got up and said, We don’t want to be the laughing stock of the town, so we should sell up the show so that everyone else will be fooled too, so we are not the only ones that are fools.  So the second night went ok, but the third night the townspeople were ready with rotten food to throw.  The Duke got a man to watch the door for a minute, while he and Huck started to speed walk to the raft after they got out of the theater.  They discovered that the king wasn’t in the town at all and all of them escaped by the raft with everything going according to plan.  They took in 465 dollars for the three nights.  After The Duke and King fell asleep, Jim started to question how the King and Duke acts, that they were rapscallions.  Huck said that most royalty is like that.

So after sleeping The Duke and The Kings tried to come up with some plan.  They dressed up Jim in some of the costume left over from King Lear, and put a sign up in front of his wigwam calling him a sick Arab.  Soon the group bought some new cloths and started to head for a town, deciding to start a a plan once they get there.  They saw a steamboat floating above the city and decided to take a boat to it.  A young man rode with them, which the King decided to ask for information.  Comes to find out that a rich man named Peter Wilks died and that his brothers William and Harvey were being waited for in the town.  The king asked the man all the information that he could about the town until he drained all information.  Then Huck and the crew came ashore and flagged down another Boat towards the village, where when they got there the King introduced himself and the Duke as William and Harvey.  They were informed of Peter’s death and started to mourn.  They also meet the three nieces of Peter, one which was named Mary-Jane.  Everyone was fooled by them, except for the doctor, who didn’t believe the Kings English accent.  After a while the money peter left behind was found and the king hid it under his bed, but Huck started to feel bad about deceiving the Nieces, especially Mary-Jane, so he took the money and hid it in the coffin.  Soon after wards Huck tells Mary-Jane the Truth and the real brothers show up.  Since the village people can’t tell the difference, they decide to use the body to decide through identification.  But while on the way to the body, Jim surprised the party and they were able to escape.  Then The King and The Duke start to fight amongst themselves, until they got drunk.

Human beings, on individual levels, have the capacity to do very good things, but we as a group tend to be very horrible.  Case in point with Huckleberry Finn, If only one person got fooled, he wouldn’t spend effort in getting the whole town to be tricked too just so he wouldn’t be the only fool.  But since a large group of people were fooled, they decided to fool the rest of the town out of their money so that they won’t be the only fools.  They didn’t care that they were indirectly taking money from their fellow neighbors, they just cared that they didn’t look like fools, which was really selfish.  The Village shouldn’t focus all of their anger at Huck’s crew as much as they should towards the first group that saw the show.  If they didn’t lie and just told the truth about the show, then they would not have loosed so much money.  Instead of trying to help their fellow man, they dragged them down with them.  This is something called the crab effect, which is basically a story about a Crab trying to escape from a pot, but his fellow crabs drag him back down repeatedly.  We see the crab effect sometimes in our culture, even sometimes towards college.  Sometimes people will make comments like “oh you think you are better than me because you are going to college?” or they discourage you from going all together.  It might be because they don’t want you to succeeded, that they don’t want you to advance in what your goal is.  This effect is not only limited to college.  Instead of being happy for a friend who won a new car, someone might say “oh why does he get a new car and I don’t” and they might decide to damage the car in some way.  I think that it is a sad condition.  Now my feelings towards The Duke and The King officially changed after they decided to impersonate the brothers of a dead man.  At first their tricks were not on a personal level.  They trick a whole town through a play and the trick worked because a few people in town didn’t want their pride and image hurt.  But through impersonating the Peter Wilks’s brothers, they are playing of a small group of people’s grief, especially the three nieces.  It was at this point that I came to the realization that they could have done this in the past.  How many other people’s lives they have ruined in the past?  They try to rationalize their own actions to themselves by say that the Girl’s will be alright because they will have their house, but that doesn’t justify what they tried to do.  Actually getting to know the victims enforces the fact to the reader that what they are doing is harmful.  Their last victims were a crowd.  It is hard to identify with a crowd because they are a mass.  But an individual is easier to identify with.  An Individual you can find out their history, get to know their personality and see the effect that your actions have.  A crowd usually express one emotion, don’t really have much of a personality and the actions of a crowd usually doesn’t have an effect on an individual level, except for the target of the mob.

The War Prayer

     A community is getting ready to send it’s young men off into a war.  This war is named “The Philippine-American War” Every day the men walk down the street in their new uniforms, with their loved ones cheering them on.  The community has been overunned with patriotism.  The pastors in the churches across the community invoked the God of Battle through their speeches.  The People against the war wanted to speak up and say their peace, but feared for their physical well being.  Then Sunday came soon.  Everyone was in the church, especially the young soldiers with dreams of retreating foes and flashing sabers.  They would be sent off to the front the next day.  The people who had no family to send off to war were envious of the one who did.  Then the Pastor started to read a chapter from the Old Testament to start out the prayer.  No one in the audience can recall a prayer like this one, but during this prayer an old, pale stranger walked in and starts to go towards the pastor.  Soon the pastor finished his prayer and was surprised by the stranger.  The pastor was gently pushed aside and the stranger said that he was a servant of the Lord and your prayers have been heard.  But he warned that the prayer had a message that the community was not aware of.  The community had prayed indirectly for the suffering of complete strangers, their enemies’ families in the war.  After the stranger stopped talking, he left.  He was considered to be a Lunatic.

            The War Prayer talks about something that most people seem to either ignore or forget the enemies’ family.  We tend to dehumanize the people that are against us so that we don’t think about the fact that someone’s son or daughter is not coming home.  War has never been glamorous in reality.  Of course we have the whole “Fighting for ideals and country” thing, but I think in the field it is about survival and human beings on an individual and whole level will try to do their best to survive.  We tend to forget the enemy is human.  But it is not the solider on the fields fault when they pull the trigger.   They are fighting to survive, not for some idea.  It is not a bullet enters a body and a nice little hole is created and you fall down and die.  No, people get blown apart and die slowly sometimes, while their fellow solders either have to watch or leave them behind.  Then there is the why they are fighting.  The soldier probably doesn’t hate the enemy personally, but they are thrown into a fever pitch because their country is at war with their enemy.  The soldier, in a way, is kind of like the bullet they fire.  They are pointed towards their target and sent their way.  A difference is that a solider has a life, a choice, and someone who will miss them when they are gone. So no one really wins in a war.  A country or a group can win, but a person not so much.  Something is always destroyed,  it could be the enemy, someone’s home or sense of security in their world