Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves in the World A College Seminar Course at Bryn Mawr College

Throughout the novel I was horrified by the images that Butler conjured through her descriptive imagery. It seemed like every chapter was more depressing and terrifying than the last. While the text conveyed pictures that were haunting, the scariest part of the book was realizing that Lauren's life is not completely impossible. Drawing a parallelism between the world we live in today and the world that Lauren is running from I realized that Butler was introducing me to the much harsher yet more realistic view of life. Overall, I found the book very distressing and poignant. It evokes a sense of reality from the reader that is painful yet powerful. Having Lauren as an empath was definitely an interesting twist on the book as it made me seriously think about what it would be like to have the same affliction. Much as Lauren did, I wondered what the world would be like if everyone could feel everyone else's pain. While it wouldn't ever be perfect, I think people could definitely learn a lot from feeling what others feel. The only thing that truly bothered me about the book was that even as the novel concluded, I was still left with a very sad and lonely feeling. Though this is part of what Butler hoped to accomplish, I closed the book feeling void of character resolution (i.e. there was no happily ever after ending)- and it seemed as if the story was not quite over as Lauren had not yet found what she had set out in search of.

As a neared the end of the book, I gained more respect for Lauren and her travelers. Lauren was portrayed as strong and smart and effective in the ending sections of the book, instead of being portrayed as a zealous planner in the early sections of the book. Her second image was more appealing to me because she seemed more down to earth and less "preachy". I initially did not like her character because it seemed like she did more talking than doing. I was unsure if she was going to follow through with her plans. I also was unsure if Butler intended her character to come across in this manner or if Butler was having a difficult time "playing" a teenager. I think it is often difficult for an author to portray a young person convincingly because the author's perception of the world has changed. Butler is no longer a child. She makes Lauren come to life when she shows Lauren's struggle between her beliefs and her father's. The parent vs. child struggle convinced me that Butler could correctly portray a youth.

I thought this book offered another explanation of human "evolution" and the absence or presence of a god. We have been reading a variety of material that discussed different viewpoints of human origin and the presence of a god. This book provides another explanation. I was able to follow Lauren's "teachings" because they make sense to me. I am not a very religious person and have found it difficult to "buy" (follow) all of the teachings in the Bible because they seem out of context for me. (in a different era that is very from our own) Lauren's teachings seemed logical and neutral. All people could find support from them.

I thought it was interesting and almost unsettling how Butler makes the world regress. People become enslaved again, colonies are formed, and revolts are a common occurrence. It seemed like I was reading a history book again. This time, however, the United States' role was reversed. Instead of being one of the strongest nations, it is now like a third world country. I am curious as to why Butler chose the problems she did. They seem so vaguely familiar to the ones that have happened and the ones that are going on now.

I am frustrated, because no matter what i choose to do, it seems that I can't stop myself from hurtling toward 2026, or towards the south bronx, or towards the third world. I want to know how to stop this. i knew someone who wanted to rule the world. actually be in charge. I just want to fix it. But I don't really know how. Habitat for humanity? tutoring poor kids in west philadelphia? why does it seem so trite, like such a waste of time? I have friends going into the Israeli army, trying to protect themselves...how am i supposed to react to this?!? Will that stop us from entering/remaining in Olamina's world? I just don't think so.

And why am i pondering the meaning of life at 1:45AM on the CSEM forum? I suppose this is what freshman year is all about.
should it really take $37,000 to get me to question my values and my place in this world?
and, the last question of the night...where is G-d in all of this?
read the song lyrics. perhaps i'll provide answers at another point.

The News by Jack Johnson
brushfirefairytales (2001)

A billion people died on the news tonight
But not so many cried at the terrible sight
Well mama said
It's just make believe
You can't believe everything you see
So baby close your eyes to the lullabies
On the news tonight

Who's the one to decide that it would be alright
To put the music behind the news tonight
Well mama said
You can't believe everything you hear
The diagetic world is so unclear
So baby close your ears
On the news tonight
On the news tonight

The unobtrusive tones on the news tonight
And mama said
Mmm

Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die
At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes
Mama said
It's just make believe
You cant believe everything you see
So baby close your eyes to the lullabies
On the news tonight

Paul, Anne, Haley

happy weekend everyone. :)

Now a real future, that's tough. For every time we swear the world is going to end because XYZ has happened (see: Republicans in power) it hasn't. And even as we swear the world is getting worse and scarier and just a bad place to be, things keep on going. Hope springs eternal. In the real future, we won't have the bright, shiny, happy things of the optimists, or the dark, dank, depressing things, of the pessimists, or the grimy, messy, squalling things of the realists. We'll have the complicated, shiny, messy, dark things of our world, blue-shifted into the future as our own things of now red-shift into the past.

Things will change. The world will not end. Humans will continue to survive. And the future will be as now; life continuing as it does.

P.S. This is not my paper topic. I don't have a paper topic at the moment.

I suppose I just don't understand how someone could devote their life to the idea that God is change. To me, the idea is more suited to a bumper sticker than to a belief. Entire communites based on this one notion? It baffles me. Yet, I think Butler has something, because I can't quite completely dismiss it.

Earthseed, to me, seems more like a fragment of a viable religion. It can't really stand on its own.

Why do we desensitize ourselves? Is it possible to "resensitize" ourselves? And what can be really be done to make the world better? It does seem that the world is on track to become the way Butler describes, and in the book Lauren tries gives up on saving the earth and tries to come up with her own way to survive it and move past it. But is founding a new colony on another world the answer? Are we past the point of being able to salvage the earth or at least some valuable part of it?

I am especially affected by this recent issue with the sniper. My grandfather was at a post office in his neighborhood just a few minutes before someone was shot there. He said he hasn't felt as powerless since the Second World War. He hides between the car and the pump now when he gets his gas.

http://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/06/Butler.html

I was about to use the word post...perhaps octavia butler is asking us to think ahead, and say..Pre.

Anyway, post-election, post anonymous postings, I think I have my answer. It is time to start to question...hopefully we are doing this with our paper. But Butler has rocked me to my core, and this has all stopped being about the book, and started being about the world and where we live. Time to question why and how we act the way we act.
I can't do this right now, but perhaps butler has her own criteria for how to qualitatively evaluate the why and how. judge what is "right." it would be interesting to see. is that the purpose of religion? culture?

I'll stop now, and go to bed. I'm glad this forum is here, and I am REALLY excited to understand tacit knowledge (not to jump ahead) and to ask questions of those around me for the next paper...force them to stop acting tacitly and being acting knowingly.

Professors Thomas, Grobstein and Dalke (Haley, Paul and Anne?),
Thank you for so carefully crafting this class and this curiculum. I appreciate it more than I can express.

robert frost says:
some say the world will end in fire,
some say ice.
from what i've tasted of desire
i hold with those who favor fire.
but if i had to perish twice,
i think i know enough of hate
to say that for destruction ice
is also great
and would suffice.

lauren olamina's world in the year 2026 is burning. and frost's prediction of fire is coming true.
i beg of you my friends, my generation, my sisters, to make sure that frost is proven wrong. don't let the world end in fire or ice. don't let the world ever, ever end. the world is too beautiful for death, too beautiful to end.

Johnson begins by describing a Nintendo game that was a favorite of my son's a few years ago, Zelda: Ocarina of Time: "The plot belongs squarely to the archaic world of fairy tales--a young boy armed with magic spells sets off to rescue the princess....what you're supposed to do...takes hours of exploration and trial and error....But if you see that opacity as part of the art...then the whole experience changes: you're exploring the world of the game and the rules of the game at the same time....

I think [this generation has] developed another skill, one that almost looks like patience: they are more tolerant of being out of control, more tolerant of that exploratory phase where the rules don't all make sense, and where few goals have been clearly defined. In other words, they are uniquely equipped to embrace the more oblique control system of emergent software. The hard work for tomorrow's interactive design will be exploring the tolerance--that suspension of control--in ways that enlighten us, in ways that move beyond the insulting residue of princesses and magic spells."

At the same time, like the rules in Zelda's world, or the Sims, or in Animal Crossings--all contemporary versions of "The Game Of Life," it's still all about knowing (the rules), about being able to discern and delineate what's pure and what's dangerous, what belongs inside the perimeter and what doesn't. Whatever the cost. Tabulated by gender, to be sure, but tabulated all the same.

And that hasn't changed. The fact is, revising the story, embracing the denied, going out on a limb, even if that limb is longer than it used to be, thinner than it used to be, or configured in cyberspace, etc.--costs. It just does. Deep play again.

It costs Lauren and it'll cost us as we venture out, venture forward. Pero, no worries. Like Lauren, we know thisis all about gathering your water and your humanity about you (however others, trapped in their stasis, might judge you), about making peace, making room for change, si?

Glad we're on this journey together.

HST

"Narrative has always been about the mix of invention and repetition; stories seem like stories because they follow rules that we've learned to recognize, but the stories that we most love are ones that surprise us in some way, that break rules in the telling. They are a mix of the familiar and the strange: too much of the former, and they seem stable, formulaic; too much of the latter, and they cease to be stories. We love narrative genres--dectective, romance, action-adventure--but the word generic is always used as a pejorative....

that battle over control that underlines any work of emergent software, particularly a work that aims to entertain us, runs parallel to the clash beween repetion and invention in the art of the storyteller. A good yarn surprises us, but not too much.... great [web] designers...are control artists--they have a feel for that middle ground between free will and the nursing home, for the thin line between too much order and too little. They have a feel for the edges."

Any more deep play, anyone?
Anne

The other day in class we were discussing Ro's paper about deep play and gender. It was noted that women seem to be less involved in this kind of high stakes risk-taking than men. I suggested that perhaps women have been involved in deep play, just not in the same arena as the men, but I don't think anybody really agreed with me. (Hopefully I'm wrong) I thought about it some more and I came up with two examples where I believe women are engaging in deep play, but the stakes are not money or power over others.

There are some HIV-positive women who have given birth to HIV-negative babies. In spite of their condition these women have decided to breastfeed their babies. The risks there are extremely high! They could infect their babies with a disease that could kill them; some have had their children taken away from them by the courts. There is very little support for women who choose to do this. They (and their children) also run the risk of becoming pariahs.

I also think about the earliest homeschooling families. Not many people would consider homeschooling risky today, in fact many would say it provides a superior education. However, early on, people did indeed have their children taken from them for attempting to do this. I did read in Home Education magazine as recently as last year about a homeschooling mother (in VT, I think) who was going through a court battle to try and prevent CPS from taking her children. And it was all because she was homeschooling.

These examples don't involve high stakes money or influence for those taking the risks, although you could argue that they have opened the way for others and were influential that way, particularly the homeschoolers. But they do take an even bigger risk than those involving money or power; they risk their children's lives.

Anyway, maybe I just missed the point about deep play.

The McBrides and I also had a great time, yesterday, describing different forms of tacit knowing. Engaged particularly by Mel's descriptions of working as a dental hygenist for Alzheimer's patients, we began to speculate in particular about whether, as we age, we lose first our conscious knowledge, and then, eventually, even our bodily knowledge (of when or how to spit during a dental cleaning, for instance). Our conversation reminded me of two stories, inspired by our reading of Lakoff, which I told our Language Group last spring. I thought you all might enjoy reading them, so I reproduce them here:

Language Play: Two More Test Cases

April 15 , 2002

[If] Lakoff's right in his claim that our thinking is bodily-dependent/sensorily-determined, what difference does it make? (for the history of philosophy, for our understanding of that history, for its future? more generally, for our uses of language?) ....

Here are two short ("real-life") applications which have already occured to me.

After the Language group meets on Monday afternoons, I visit an elderly friend, Dorothy Steere, who is dying. Dorothy speaks, I now know from reading Lakoff, directly from the unconscious, and her speaking is very labile--she leaps quickly from one statement to its counterclaim, or to another completely unrelated one (often using completely nonsensical words), often before she has finished a single sentence. Today I had made a circlet of marsh marigolds for my hair, thinking it would please
and amuse her--which it did. But she kept reaching out to touch it and say, "I love your pink . . . row." Occasionally she would add: "I love your pink row . . . . yel . . . low." This refrain (which she repeated numerous times while I was there) reminded me,of course, both of Stanlaw's essay on the evolutionary sequence of color nomenclature, and of Lakoff's description of color as an embodied concept: not just a reflection of an external reality, but the result of the evolution of our bodies/brains. So now I want to know what happens when we become senile: Does Dorothy now "see" yellow as pink? Has she just "lost" the word for what she still "sees" as the same color?

This "evolution" (or de-volution) made me think differently about a conversation Mark Lord and I were having as we left today's session.... We had been toying w/ the idea that each of us feels "most real" either when we are encountering a space of possibility--something about to happen, but not yet realized--or when we have an awareness, in a moment of fulfillment, of its transitoriness (as in a point of connection w/ another human being,
which we know will end soon). Paradoxically (?), those moments which "feel" to both of us most "real" are NOT those which are most stable/secure, but just the opposite: those that are unstable, about to change. I'm thinking now that a metaphor marks just such a moment: it is a link that is tenuous, an analogy which both gestures towards what is the same ("my love is a red red rose") and towards its difference (my love is NOT....); it only works because the two terms ("tenor" and "vehicle") are both like
AND not; it both compares and indicates the limits of the comparison.

There is (likewise) something very "real" about my encounters w/ Dorothy, in which language is used so unpredictably, so tenuously, so . . . playfully. That's where the "real" world is, neither "out there" nor "in here," but in that connection, in that tenuous, unstable play between . . . what I think I perceive and what I think I know (and can say) about it.

Anne

Subject: On Losing Categories (the World?)

April 24, 2002

... I was intrigued, in our discussion of language last week, not only by the inevitability of our categorizing ...but also by the
strong disjunction/paradox I saw between Lakoff's claim that, though our thinking is shaped by our bodies, what we think is not necessarily (or at least we cannot know if it is) a reflection of the world outside ourselves. I think we were trying to cross that divide, at the end of our session, by playing w/ the notion that a metaphor expresses the relationship, is the analogy between what we experience internally and the sensory imput we receive. This capacity to "metaphorize"...is never context free, but it is also not entirely context dependent; the "categories of our mind are not those of the world."

My visit to Dorothy this week seemed to me another playing out of this paradox. I could hear weaving in and out of my conversation w/ her not only Lakoff's claim that the ability to categorize is inherent, impossible for neural beings like ourselves NOT to perform, but also [Elaine] Scarry's reflections on the "counterfactual" process of "imagining flowers" (which she described as a "mimesis of perception," of the sensorily present). What I am really wondering, though, is whether Dorothy's fragmented
musings might tell us anything "new" about Pinker's claims about the "language instinct."

Dorothy is very hard of hearing, so we communicate by my writing out what I have to say. She reads what I have written, then responds in speech (so one variable, in the story upcoming, is certainly the legibility of my writing). Anyhow: this Monday I placed a bouquet of lilacs in a vase on Dorothy's table, then wrote on a piece of paper lying in front of them, "These are lilacs from my yard." Running her finger under the flowers, and along the words I had written, Dorothy read, "These are daisies from
my yard." A few minutes later, she read the line aloud again, this time decoding it as, "These are daylilies from my yard." A few minutes after, she read and revised once again, "These are lilies from my yard." When I asked her directly, "Dorothy, what kind of flowers are these?" she responded, "It's lavender." Although she couldn't remember the name for lilacs , she seemed still, at this point in our conversation, to be recognizing the category "flower" and (or @ least) its appropriate color category.

But then, as our conversation turned to food, she reached out, took hold of the bouquet, and said, "I want to eat these, they look so good." A bit later she commented that she had never seen this color before. When I asked her what color it was, she said, "It's gentle....these get very quiet" (they WERE a very pale shade of lilac). She seemed to be sliding @ this point into a wonderful sort of jumbled synesthesia.... What struck me most was that only one sense was missing from the range of those Dorothy was giving voice to. Although she'd mentioned sight (flower and color names), taste ("eat"), touch ("gentle") and sound ("quiet"), her descriptions had omitted the one sensory perception that is most remarkable about lilacs, and was certainly a characteristic of those I had brought: their very strong smell.

When I asked her directly, however, what the flowers smelled like, she said, "It's a smell that I can't remember SEEING before...." and (a little later), "Have you ever TASTED that kind of thing before?" When I wrote that it was very familiar to me, she responded, "It's known to you, it's known to you? I don't recall it now..." and then (a little later), "I'm interested in things different from anything else. For instance, I have never seen anything like this before, and that makes it very interesting."
Dorothy seemed to havehad moved, by the end of our conversation, from a clear recognition of, if not the individual flower before her, both the category "flower" and its appropriate color name, through a synethesic description of its qualities, to an awareness that she had no categories available to her @ all for recognizing/describing what she was seeing. Several other comments she made along the way reinforced this impression: "My eyes get very hard, these old eyes," she said; and later, in
response to a note from a friend, "Baby goats. What kind of animal is that?" Finally, when I wrote that I needed to get back to work, to serve champagne to our senior theses writers, she reached out, gathered the lilacs in her hands again, and said, "Champagne? Are these champagne?"

Most of my questions about this very-evocative conversation have to do w/Lakoff's description of the sensory basis of our thinking/categorizing/metaphorization. Is it because Dorothy's sensory imput has so diminished that the "appropriate" words are no longer available to her to describe her experiences of perception? Is she speaking so fully from her unconscious at this point in her life that the categories formed by our conscious mind--such as the separation of the five senses one from another (?) are not operative for her anymore? How would Pinker, Scarry, Lakoff "make sense" of this story? How do you?

Anne

I tried to distill a minimum set of criteria to test for evidence of deep play. There are many other key characteristics involved, but here's what I gleaned as the essential elements:
1) The rules or tenets of the game are part of the traditions of the community, and there is a connection between the community's attitudes and the game. For example, for Balinese cockfighters and their audience (the men of the community), the fight makes abstractions such as death, masculinity, aggression, pride, etc. concrete and gives a language to Balinese attitudes about these aspects of life.
2) The more money (or material stuff) at risk, the more status there is at risk. The deep players wield significant influence in their community. They dominate and define the game, just as they dominate and define the society in which the game takes place. As with the Balinese cockfight, the material risk does not make the play deep; what happens as a result of taking such a risk makes the play deep. It sets the stage for shifts in social status to flow back and forth between the community and the game. For this reason, the game must be public; witnesses from within the community are necessary ingredients, because the flow of status and power is ultimately granted or withheld by them.
3) The deeper the game is, the greater the emotional investment. Players and avid spectators are immersed, live in the moment, have a heightened awareness and sense of purpose. Deep play makes meaning. Social passions are enacted. It feels compelling and necessary.

Then, I explored (albeit superficially) three situations in which I think I see deep play:
1) founding a religion, as Olamena does throughout Butler's novel,
2) engaging in "hairy" teaching methods. (We could argue that requiring us to read Parable of the Sower" qualifies), and
3) a social hobby -- I used the cat (show) fancy.

What struck me is that deep play can exact a significant toll on people not involved in the game. I tried to understand what motivates some of us to play deeply. My hunch is that we do so in order to live more fully, make more meaning, and earn more authority.... the latter, to effect change.

There's a lot more meat on them bones... if only we had time and talent to go after better understanding. For example, it may be that deep play is often the purview of male players. How much is one's wilingness to engage in and succeed at deep play interwoven with one's ability to gain power in several other aspects of our society?
Good stuff.
Cheers,
Ro.

As for what you can do with that space ... have a look at The Brain's Images: Reflecting and Creating Understanding. Can sometimes be a little scarey to know we don't know all we know ... but there's gold in them thar hills.

I drove through west philly wednesday, and I have never been so struck. for all those who said that octavia butler's world doesn't exist, drown down lancaster ave. see the houses of lower merion and the main line turn into the barely standing houses, with the gates on the windows and doors...ok, so i have gates on my windows and doors at hoe...but this was something more. any advice on how to live a life knowing what reality exists outside our walls?

one more thing....i noticed thatdean thomas used spanish in her posting...and i know she knows the translations of pero and si. I have often found thatother languages carry more resonance for me-do they do the same for other people?

that's enough for one day. have a good weekend,
Jessie

Seriously :), in the in the mean and in-between time, I'd like to ask a question, perhaps make a plea for playfulness in play. To wit, etic--that is, external categories, context-distant I(academic) taxonomies aside--doesn't deep play need to fit some local, some insider's version of PLAY? By that I think I mean an awareness of Jouissance, a conscious prickle of pleasure, of time-out of timeness even when, especially when that "real" pleasure is painful, illegal, taboo, fleeting.

Don't get me wrong. Long live the author; boo, hiss to claustrophobic, monological interpretations. Who is an "insider" anyway?

On the other hand, something in me wants to balk at the idea that anything, everything we (who's that?) might read as subversive, dialogical, dialectic or as "deep," is playful. It seems to me somethings, to some folks are deep, opaque, conflicted, risky and not at all to be played with, not at all playful, however they might appear to those of us/you peering over shoulders, reading into the lives of folks we/you keep in play.

Playas always know whaz up, that the game is afoot; players don't necessarily, tacitly or consciously. So are they playing or are we?

Bon weekend to all,

HST

(and Jessie, you're right. British and Guyanese English are my first languages. But often I can't find the US English words that convey what I mean and BE and GE are equally coy. So I resort to Spanish or French, often a mixture of each, to channel what is on the tip of my tongue and also what's behind it).

One of three criteria I chose to use as a test for labeling an act deep play is the notion that the players and spectators are immersed, caught up in the moment, have a heightened awareness and sense of purpose... that It feels compelling and necessary. The thrill of engaging in it (publicly ) seems to be important .

Basically,I saw the essential ingredients as:
- even odds, i.e., no edge that suggests you're going to win,
- extreme material investment (money, job, house, physical safety, etc)
- an audience to grant status (or not) beyond the play -- in the community,
- an exhilarating lure of the "game" that brings the best players back, again and again to make extreme emotional investments in the deepest plays,
- symbols surrounding the play that reflect (and, therefore, teach) the attitudes of the community.

I could instantly see striking similarities between the cockfight and the cat fancy, having participated in instances of such deep play myself (years ago). I can tell you that the rush was overwhelmingly compelling.... and was created from having an audience, rules and rituals among us, and a deep connection in that community as a result of our common (tacit?) understanding of the symbols involved.

You wrote: ".... while orah and i are stuck, dealing with our fears of a world of mass destruction, the mcbrides, anne and dean thomas (HST? haley?) have moved on to deep play-the forces that shape our crazy world. do the mcbrides and the others with more life experience have more hope that it will be ok? do they know it will be ok? I want to move on from butler, and i'd like to know how others did it."

"..any advice on how to live a life knowing what reality exists outside our walls? "

My first reaction is to want to give you a hug '-) And my second is to resist the urge to speak for "the mcbrides" or with any kind of assumed wisdom. We're all in this together.

The only thing I will say -- my view alone -- is that Butler got to write her story and you will get to write yours. From each, I'm going to take what I can put to good use.

S**T happens. And every time it does, I try to grab it by the tail as a gift. So, grab Butler by the tail, thank her for the pain -- which leads to thinking/ feeling/ growing, and come on forward with us.

Hopefully, I'm not sounding too pompous or other generational ;-) It's pre- coffee.
Hugs,
Ro
ps... speaking of coffee, if you wanna talk over a cuppa, ... holler.

I just wanted to say that I wrote about homeschooling as a response to Margaret K.'s proposal that homeschooling is deep play. As a homeschooler of three children (now in college) I just felt I had to respond and maybe inform a little about homeschooling and my own experience.

I think it is interesting as an "emergent" system. In that there are something like 23,000 homeschoolers in Pa. as of Spring 2002.

"Like other suicide martyrs, Mazen left a last will and testament, he told his mother, "Don't cry for me. These words are painful. I shall greet you at the gates of paradise." He said these words just before he was killed in a suicide attack on an Israeli compound.
Droge and Tabor propose the following five characteristics of religious martyrdom in their paper "Sacrifice of Self" which studies religious martyrdom in several cultures.
1. The martyr's death reflects situation of opposition and persecution.
2. The authors view their deaths as necessary, noble and heroic.
3. These individuals are often eager to die, indeed, in several cases they end up directly killing themselves.
4. There is often the idea of vicarious benefit resulting from their suffering and death.
5. The expectation of vindication and reward beyond death more often than not, is a prime motivation for their choice of death.

Bentham defines deep play as "play for which the stakes are so high that in a utilitarian sense it is irrational to play." Characteristics of religious martyrdom establish it as the deepest form of deep play. Religious martyrs display an eagerness to play for the highest stakes and through their own deaths, to have the hope of gaining social recognition and spiritual rewards including eternal life.
As a Catholic, my own faith has a culture of religious martyrdom which parallels the recent religious martyrs/suicide bombers of the present day. In my paper, I want to establish that religious martyrdom clearly is deep play. I also want to discuss and compare the culture of religious martyrdom in my own heritage with the cult of the Shaheed.

"Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion" Edited by MargaretMcCormack Oxford Univ. Press 2002
"A Noble Death: Doge, Arthur J. 1953"
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Martyrs_and_mothers.asp
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june02/martyr_3-19.html

I did mean those maverick homeschoolers of not too long ago--those who were the first to buck the system. Now that homeschooling is pretty much universally accepted there isn't much risk involved. Of course, there are those whose ideology won't allow them to put their kids in school for any reason, so they are taking something of a risk, I guess, but they have so many resources outside the traditional school system that it hardly seems like it.

As far as having hope for the future, my faith in God is really the motivation there. And I stand by the old adage, "Faith without works is dead," so I am as involved in my community as I can be. I am the coordinator of my church's soup kitchen outreach and on the 7th of every month we prepare and serve a lunch time meal to approximately 220 people in Wilmington who might not otherwise have anything to eat. Habit For Humanity is another place I volunteer. I vote!! I help out in my son's classroom whenever I can. I do various other short-term things as they present themselves. I also agree with that catch-phrase, "Think globally, act locally," so much of what I do is based in my own community, although I support larger causes, too.

I think orah said it-- we have the power to change things. We do! We have the RESPONSIBLILTY to do it! I think Butler's book was a damning indictment of those of us who can do something but choose not to. It can be depressing sometimes. There is so much injustice in the world. I voted, yet George Bush was elected anyway! In the city of Wilmington there are 2600 families living in substandard housing. That's families--the actual number of people is much higher. Yet Habitat New Castle County can only build/renovate 11 houses a year! They hope to be completing 25 houses a year starting in 2005. It doesn't even scratch the surface but if more and more people would get involved who knows what could happen!

The other thing I promised myself I would do is speak out when I see something that isn't right and not let myself be silenced by either intimidation from those I disagree with or by the apathy and indifference of others. That's hard and can be very lonely sometimes and I don't always succeed. Being accepted to Bryn Mawr is such a privilege and I hope to use my education here to focus myself and learn to use my voice--speaking or writing--to succeed more than I fail in this and to try and make a difference in the world. My husband is always teasing me that I am too much of an idealist but I sincerely believe this: if people would stop saying "things will never change" or "it won't make any difference, so why bother?" and get off their asses and DO SOMETHING, it will make a difference and things WILL change!

Well, hopefully I don't sound as preachy as I think I do. My apologies if I do.


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