0 I used to rule the world...

It's been nearly 45 years since King's assassination and I'm not going to yesterday. 45 years is a long time and his death doesn't hurt anymore. What he fought for, however, still does. MLK Jr. was one of several leaders of the civil rights movement. He protested peacefully and ask for everyone else to as well along with loving your enemy. Isn't it funny, that a man who fought against violence and taking what you want was taken from this world by an angry man with a sniper rifle?

This great man was filled by a small bullet which, in any other situation, would have rendered his point obsolete, wrong. However, it seemed as if his death sent his message to a roaring and crashing crescendo. It's sad to think that there are kids who don't even now who he is. These are elementary school children who don't know why we get the third Monday in January off. It's sad, but unsurprising considering our current society.

Today, it is unheard of, peace. Well, that's not fair of me to say. It's heard of and usually ends tragically. Today, you see peaceful protest turn into police rallys.

Once upon a time, King ruled. He was an example of hard work and peacefulness and love. But today, he doesn't even receive a passing thought. He has become another forgotten figure of history. I wouldn't be able to say this before but I think it's safe to say now that King is no longer kit.

0 One Prime

Music is a part of nearly everyone's lives. Life gets interesting when the songs of two people's soundtracks begin to overlap.I have a fried, Jy, and I have a tendency to study or work with her. And when you work with Jy, the number one rule is her playlist or no playlist. Which I'm absolutely cool with because sometimes I need music to break me out of my loop of pop and RnB and old school soul music. One Prime was like a bridge to another world of music. One Prime is a playlist off of the beaten path and now I present to you my top three tracks from it.

Now a big part of music for me is the lyrics. I'm a very word orientated person. Lyrics mean a lot to me and I will suffer through a lot just for the perfect lyrics. Usually I look for lyrics that express things that mean a lot to me. My way or thinking or something. In the first song, "Kitchen Sink"

Are you searching for purpose?
Then write something, yeah it might be worthless
Then paint something then, it might be wordless
Pointless curses, nonsense verses
You'll see purpose start to surface
No one else is dealing with your demons
Meaning maybe defeating them
Could be the beginning of your meaning, friend.

I mean look at this! Look at these lyrics? When you hear the song, the first few times the words past through your speakers nearly faster than you can hear them. The more I listen, the faster I get. And it just seems so perfect. And then there's "Holding on to You", also by Twenty One Pilots. This one I'm less emotionally attached to but there are some gems in the lyrics. The first verse, as nonsensical as it may seem, starts out strong and

Fight it, take the pain, ignite it
Tie a noose around your mind
Loose enough to breath fine and tie it
To a tree tell it,
You belong to me, this ain't a noose
This is a leash and I have news for you
You must obey me! 

I have this habit of digging for answers to my life in media. "What I'm Looking For" is different for me. I first heard this song when I stumbled upon this comic someone had drew for it. I was in love with the words in the comic (I told you I'm very text orientated) and the song and the meaning in it. Instead of just posting the lyrics, I've picked some choice panels. I really recommend following the link and reading the entire thing. The work is beautiful

 

I heard it last summer and for this point in my life it's incredibly appropriate. Generally I look for answers in my songs but this is just like saying that it's okay that I have questions and I don't think I can't not love it. And it's a good message we all need. You won't know where's you're headed or your destination but you must keep going. .

0 Hiding from ourselves in each other...

"No Exit" is a wonderfully deep story about the pits of hell without the general fanfare expected with it. The premise was brilliant, with the well-known quote the thesis and the rest of the book the support. "Hell is other people." This is show through the characters themselves. Each of the three have carefully cultivated pasts and personalities that are born to get under the others' skins. Estelle is Inez's past victim  while Inez is the woman who took Estelle's man after her death. To Estelle, Garcin is the man she coveted and ruined her life with and to him she is his wife, his victim and Inez is one of his many critics. And it's absolutely great, the fact that the characters link up with each other like that. It's absolutely perfect.

But something they don't address but I think is evident is hell is ourselves as much as it is other people. The three are tortured by who they are and where and they're memories as much as they are tortured by each other. If not for themselves being themselves, the others would have no effect on them.

I think that's why I truly enjoyed No Exit, because the underlying theme there. Anywhere can be your own personal hell because you can have it be so.

0 Frankly Speaking

Dear Mr. Frankl,

Thank you. I recently read your book, Man's Search for Meaning, in my Philosophy class and even though I can't know for sure, I'm positive that it has changed it. In my education for outside of it, I have read many books on the Holocaust. There is little that surprises me about it, yet the terrible acts that went on still affects me. Yet, your book was not a rehousing of gas chambers and torture. It was something more, about man and the potential of humanity and how we play with the cards we're dealt.

There are so many points where you stop just talking about life in the concentration camp and examine life as a whole. For example, my favorite passage was:

“To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.”

This struck home with me. Just the day before I read that, we were discussing comparing sufferings in my class. We were talking about a failed grade not being worth as much as a term in a concentration camp. Someone brought up the fact that you cannot compare sufferings but we couldn’t quite put into words what we meant. The analogy you use and the way you phrase it perfectly describes suffering. While reading this passage (and while I reread it many a time), I wondered: was the reference to the chamber intentional? Did you think of the analogy because of the gas chambers around you? I can’t see something more powerful to use. For the prisoners of the concentration camp, they were literally killed by their suffering when it became too much, even in their vessels.

Another thing in your book that kind of spoke to me was the passage about religion. When you were talking about politics and religion being the exceptions to the cultural hibernation in the camps, at first this didn’t make sense. The politics part, I could understand. But I’ve never been an overly religious person. Or, any kind of religious at all. But then it got me thinking. Why would, in a camp where everything else stopped, would one still believe in their god, their god who let or made these terrible things happen to them. I searched the internet a bit and gathered that in dark times, regardless of the cause, people needed spiritual guidance. They needed something to help them carry on, regardless of how they got into that situation. If I was in that situation, regardless of my current beliefs, I could see myself converting, if only to find some semblance of help. In their song “Breakeven (Falling to Pieces)” by The Script, they sing, “I’m still alive but I’m barely breathing/Just praying to a god that I don’t believe in.” From what you wrote, this is what would happen to me. When you’re barely breathing, barely lasting, even if you don’t believe, you need something behind you.

A theme of my life right now, as is normal I”d assume of most teenagers, is my search for the meaning in my life. I’m full of question right now. Why am I here? Why do I go on? Why do I even bother? Your socratic esque way of questioning, that deals with the right now rather than the past, is something I’m trying to adopt into my own life. As Brendan Benson sings in his song, “I don’t know what I’m looking for but I know that I just wanna look some more.” Thanks to your guidance, I know the right things to look for. I now know to focus on my current and my future rather than my past. To use a cards reference once again, we all are dealt from the same deck and the outcome of the game depends on how you use your hand, no one who has won in the past.

Thank you for you immense wisdom and for your book on it,

Sydney Gillary