Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Levels of Gratitude
I'm thankful. I tell myself all the time. I appreciate my life, my family, my faith, my friends. I am glad to be alive. I am blessed, I repeatedly say...blessed to the fullest. I have been given so much, I acknowledge that. Thanksgiving is that special day when I get the chance to tell myself all the louder, "I AM THANKFUL." Actually, it would probably sound more like "MY MAM FANKFUL" being that on this day, more often than not, food is in my mouth. Yep, while I am figuratively proclaiming my own gratuity toward my blessings, I get to indulge myself in those blessings like no other day of the year. Sometimes I wonder if feasting and gorging is the best way to truly experience and express gratitude for that which we are given.
My family has a long kept Thanksgiving Day tradition where, before our meal, we read the account of the first Thanksgiving. Every year I am reminded of the strife that those early settlers, the Pilgrims endured during their early years in the New World. Did you know that in their first year alone, nearly half of those that arrived on the Mayflower were wiped out by sickness? Those who did survive were rationed extremely small amounts of food (like 5 kernels of corn a day) and were constantly working to ensure the safety and survival of the group. Those Pilgrims really had something to be thankful for when at long last they had established themselves as a colony, with enough food and provision to sustain them for the next harsh, New England winter.
When I consider the Pilgrims and the deep, real gratitude that they must have experienced at that first Thanksgiving , my pathetic thankfulness seems to wither away. It's not like I ever saw starvation, or sickness, or any life threatening situation for that matter. If we in America today wanted to, most could have a Thanksgiving meal each and every day of the year. We are blessed that much. Overindulgence is a way of life for most modern Americans, and we have grown very comfortable with having things that way. Thanksgiving has become a novelty. We simply do it as a tradition, not because we are actually genuinely grateful for provision or protection, but because we're told it's the right thing to do. So we go through that day with the thought screaming in our head, "I AM THANKFUL", but is it truly felt in the heart?
I don't know about you, but I want my thankfulness to be genuine and deep. I want to recognize to the best of my ability the fact that we today are so richly blessed beyond measure, in innumerable ways. Our way of life today is something that nearly every generation before us could not have hoped to achieve. Yet it is so ironic. The only thing we lack is the ability to be greatful on such a deep level. Have any of us ever experienced this feeling of gratitude before? Will we ever? I believe that hardship must be seen before true gratitude can be felt. I'm not saying that I want to face hardships and strife just so I can experience this feeling of appreciation. I can only hope that somehow, we today in 2007 America can say "I AM THANKFUL", and not just think it, but feel it.
My family has a long kept Thanksgiving Day tradition where, before our meal, we read the account of the first Thanksgiving. Every year I am reminded of the strife that those early settlers, the Pilgrims endured during their early years in the New World. Did you know that in their first year alone, nearly half of those that arrived on the Mayflower were wiped out by sickness? Those who did survive were rationed extremely small amounts of food (like 5 kernels of corn a day) and were constantly working to ensure the safety and survival of the group. Those Pilgrims really had something to be thankful for when at long last they had established themselves as a colony, with enough food and provision to sustain them for the next harsh, New England winter.
When I consider the Pilgrims and the deep, real gratitude that they must have experienced at that first Thanksgiving , my pathetic thankfulness seems to wither away. It's not like I ever saw starvation, or sickness, or any life threatening situation for that matter. If we in America today wanted to, most could have a Thanksgiving meal each and every day of the year. We are blessed that much. Overindulgence is a way of life for most modern Americans, and we have grown very comfortable with having things that way. Thanksgiving has become a novelty. We simply do it as a tradition, not because we are actually genuinely grateful for provision or protection, but because we're told it's the right thing to do. So we go through that day with the thought screaming in our head, "I AM THANKFUL", but is it truly felt in the heart?
I don't know about you, but I want my thankfulness to be genuine and deep. I want to recognize to the best of my ability the fact that we today are so richly blessed beyond measure, in innumerable ways. Our way of life today is something that nearly every generation before us could not have hoped to achieve. Yet it is so ironic. The only thing we lack is the ability to be greatful on such a deep level. Have any of us ever experienced this feeling of gratitude before? Will we ever? I believe that hardship must be seen before true gratitude can be felt. I'm not saying that I want to face hardships and strife just so I can experience this feeling of appreciation. I can only hope that somehow, we today in 2007 America can say "I AM THANKFUL", and not just think it, but feel it.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Mental Illness... Where to point the finger?
I was surprised to see how interconnected every social issue of The Glass Castle is with the next. If I were to conjure up a metaphor to represent all of these social issues, it would be a mass of paper clips. Although each paper clip is an individual, it can be easily linked to countless others. Before you know it, you could have an entire strand of them. In many ways, that is how I see my topic of Depression. Yes, it is a mental illness, but it is also a treatable mental illness, that, for many reasons wasn't treated.
Perhaps if some of the other social issues had not been plaguing the family, this problem would have been better addressed and more easily dealt with. If Rex could have left his alcoholism and kept a job for more than a few months, not only would there have been a decent income for the family, but a father in the home for the wife and children. I see the father as the backbone of the family. A husband and father that does not uphold his responsibilities will have a strikingly devastating effect on every other member of the family. We see this happen repeatedly throughout The Glass Castle.
Rose Mary may indeed have had depression even if she wasn't in her poverty stricken, neglectful, and abusive situation. However, it could have been dealt with in a totally different manner, had she had a steady life and decent husband. One startling statistic that I found in my research of this topic was that 80% to 90% of those who get treatment will be relieved of many if not all of the symptoms in only a few weeks. WOW! What a profound difference could have been made on the Wall's family had the mother only had the opportunity to receive treatment for her bi-polar disorder.
These solid facts lead me to beg the question...who or what is to blame for Rose Mary's depression. In other words, what caused her to miss out on such beneficial treatment? I hate to sound like a broken record, but I believe that Rex's alcoholism played a huge role. It brought about the poverty that disabled her financial ability to get help. It also brought about the neglect that kept her in her home for so long, wallowing in her sad thoughts. Not only that, but Rex didn't attempt to understand Rose Mary's problem nearly enough. He simply blew her off as being extremely temperamental. He didn't see her problem as a mental illness, but as a silly weakness.
Additionally, the environment in which the family lived most definitely helped to aggravate Rose Mary's condition. She was left alone for days at a time in a dump of a house, with no money, little food, and a small crowd of young, growing children, in need of her attention. Sadly, Rose Mary needed just as much attention as did her children and sometimes even gave her own needs first priority over them. An example of this can be found it the scene on page 186 where the children find a valuable ring and hope to pawn it to get food for the family. Rose Mary instead decides to keep the ring for her own "self esteem"and allowed her kids go hungry.
Although I would really like to place all of the blame for Rose Mary's condition in one location to make it nice and easy, it simply can't be done. You could chock this problem up to genetics, Rex's Alcoholism, the poverty, neglect, the burden of the children, or Rose Mary herself. There is evidence to support all of those causes and I'm sure that one could argue for a host of others that I haven't mentioned. Whatever way you look at the causes, the tragic fact is that help was available, and she didn't get it. I can't help but wonder how things could have changed if she was able to get treatment for her illness. Would she be on the streets today?? Hmmmmmm....
Perhaps if some of the other social issues had not been plaguing the family, this problem would have been better addressed and more easily dealt with. If Rex could have left his alcoholism and kept a job for more than a few months, not only would there have been a decent income for the family, but a father in the home for the wife and children. I see the father as the backbone of the family. A husband and father that does not uphold his responsibilities will have a strikingly devastating effect on every other member of the family. We see this happen repeatedly throughout The Glass Castle.
Rose Mary may indeed have had depression even if she wasn't in her poverty stricken, neglectful, and abusive situation. However, it could have been dealt with in a totally different manner, had she had a steady life and decent husband. One startling statistic that I found in my research of this topic was that 80% to 90% of those who get treatment will be relieved of many if not all of the symptoms in only a few weeks. WOW! What a profound difference could have been made on the Wall's family had the mother only had the opportunity to receive treatment for her bi-polar disorder.
These solid facts lead me to beg the question...who or what is to blame for Rose Mary's depression. In other words, what caused her to miss out on such beneficial treatment? I hate to sound like a broken record, but I believe that Rex's alcoholism played a huge role. It brought about the poverty that disabled her financial ability to get help. It also brought about the neglect that kept her in her home for so long, wallowing in her sad thoughts. Not only that, but Rex didn't attempt to understand Rose Mary's problem nearly enough. He simply blew her off as being extremely temperamental. He didn't see her problem as a mental illness, but as a silly weakness.
Additionally, the environment in which the family lived most definitely helped to aggravate Rose Mary's condition. She was left alone for days at a time in a dump of a house, with no money, little food, and a small crowd of young, growing children, in need of her attention. Sadly, Rose Mary needed just as much attention as did her children and sometimes even gave her own needs first priority over them. An example of this can be found it the scene on page 186 where the children find a valuable ring and hope to pawn it to get food for the family. Rose Mary instead decides to keep the ring for her own "self esteem"and allowed her kids go hungry.
Although I would really like to place all of the blame for Rose Mary's condition in one location to make it nice and easy, it simply can't be done. You could chock this problem up to genetics, Rex's Alcoholism, the poverty, neglect, the burden of the children, or Rose Mary herself. There is evidence to support all of those causes and I'm sure that one could argue for a host of others that I haven't mentioned. Whatever way you look at the causes, the tragic fact is that help was available, and she didn't get it. I can't help but wonder how things could have changed if she was able to get treatment for her illness. Would she be on the streets today?? Hmmmmmm....
Thursday, October 11, 2007
That Thing That we all Block Out
Well its been about a week now since we have left the topic of The Things They Carried in class, and I was feeling a little overwhelmed with the innumerable topics available to discuss. As I was sifting through the book again, rethinking many of the quotes and excerpts, I was once again struck with the ever presence of death within life. I feel that as youthful students living in free and peaceful America, our perspective of life is simply unrealistic and whimsickle. Somehow we manage to daily avoid the simple and terrifying fact that we are going to die, (and in the not so distant future I might add). It is a truth that noone can avoid. Yet, i found it not only curious, but bothersome to see how we continue to live as though death doesn't matter.
How often can one find examples of the evasion of death in our own culture. I don't know about you, but I see it everywhere. Think about our funerals. They are an excellent example because they are, for many of us, the only time when we are seriously confronted with death. When you consider what we do to that poor body all to make ourselves feel better, it really can astound. We take the rotting corpse of the deceased, clean it and dress it to near perfection in an attempt to preserve it for as long as possible. We dress it up like a doll, adding makeup to the face to bring back lifelike color and dressing it in only the highest quality clothing. Does all the unnecessary embalming and beautification of the deceased body really change the fact that the guy/gal is dead? Nope, but somehow helps to make the enire concept of death more bearable and understandable to those who finally have to face it.
I am sure that the young men who went off to war in Vietnam had a similarly sugar coated American perspective of death entering the war as the one that we tend to have today. In the war there was no time or space to reason away the fact of death as we do at home. It was unexpectadly thrusted out into the faces of these poor soldiers. There was no way to avoid or censor it. In that moment recounted by O'Brien when Curt Lemon was blasted to countless pieces death became more real to those men than it ever had before. One has to wonder what the effects of such immediate exposure can be. Well, wonder no longer. O'Brien gives us the answer on page 81:
"Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil-everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self-your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil, you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're dead."
It almost makes you wish we could all experience death...like that. Hmmmmmm...
How often can one find examples of the evasion of death in our own culture. I don't know about you, but I see it everywhere. Think about our funerals. They are an excellent example because they are, for many of us, the only time when we are seriously confronted with death. When you consider what we do to that poor body all to make ourselves feel better, it really can astound. We take the rotting corpse of the deceased, clean it and dress it to near perfection in an attempt to preserve it for as long as possible. We dress it up like a doll, adding makeup to the face to bring back lifelike color and dressing it in only the highest quality clothing. Does all the unnecessary embalming and beautification of the deceased body really change the fact that the guy/gal is dead? Nope, but somehow helps to make the enire concept of death more bearable and understandable to those who finally have to face it.
I am sure that the young men who went off to war in Vietnam had a similarly sugar coated American perspective of death entering the war as the one that we tend to have today. In the war there was no time or space to reason away the fact of death as we do at home. It was unexpectadly thrusted out into the faces of these poor soldiers. There was no way to avoid or censor it. In that moment recounted by O'Brien when Curt Lemon was blasted to countless pieces death became more real to those men than it ever had before. One has to wonder what the effects of such immediate exposure can be. Well, wonder no longer. O'Brien gives us the answer on page 81:
"Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil-everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self-your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil, you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're dead."
It almost makes you wish we could all experience death...like that. Hmmmmmm...
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