Sunday!

The weather is finally starting to act like it's spring and today was a glorious day! And nice weather always puts me in the mood for poetry, although these two books I'm blogging about aren't necessarily the right kind of poetry. Anyway, I'm moving into another new section of Poems to Live By: In Troubling Times. This section is called: "Those Destroyed by Success: Complacency and Complicity."

The opening poem for the section, "Whenever That Happened" by Brendan Kennelly seems like a very sad poem with no hope  at all. It is a realization that all the good in the world disappears once you forget to appreciate all the beauty in it. The poem speaks of taking friendship for granted and losing wonder, however it seems that once wonder has gone, the speaker suggests we gain power. It seems they are saying by losing our innocence we gain power, although this seems like a bad thing and I concur with the speaker. In my experience, people with power are often evil or unjust to some extent.

There's a blurb by Stephen Dunn titled "Scruples" in this section, although it's not a poem, just a short article. Dunn is a teacher of Literature & Ethics and conducts a test of his students every year to see which of them would be willing to press a button that would kill a random peasant from across the world in exchange for a million dollars. The test is done anonymously. Dunn says when he first began the test in 1982 only four of twenty-five would press the button, but by 1995 eleven of twenty-five would press it. He says by the end of the school year he is usually able to figure out which students are the ones who would be willing to press the button, just by their personalities, although he says they're not always the same type of people. Sometimes they are intelligent and all around good students, but other times they just seem like bad people. Dunn claims the rise in students willing to press the button is due to the world becoming more "doggie-dog." And in my opinion, I think it is often our parents fault that this happens. They want us to be competitive in school so we can go far in life, but where does that leave everyone else. This is something I've pondered many times. As a Christian, how can I morally think it is right to strive for success when  that often means holding others back, especially in certain classes where the professors tell us only a few people will get A's and B's, while the majority will do worse just because that's the way he grades the class. That kind of classroom situation in particular, one that places students on a bell-curve model, creates a dog-eat-dog atmosphere like the situation  Dunn speaks of. Why are we not able to all be successful? I may have to devote another post to this topic because I feel like I have a lot more to say.