In Sam Hamills writing "The Necessity to Speak" touches on a very interesting and highly controvesial subject. He essentially talks about we as human beings and americans are our own worst enemies. We wish to live in a world free of violence. Every evening we turn on the news and see countless stories of someone was murdered or beatten in an alley. We fear the images of this, and wish the world was just a better place. So we close out eyes and pretend it is, we do not face reality and deal with our problems.
Sam Hamill writes that we promote viloence in this world but our silence. We hide our children from grim realities, realities of our past. Ones we feel are just to hard to deal with, and the children should never have to know such horror. We prefer to live in our own little fairy tails, the violence occuring in other countries are viewed as not our problem. What can we do about it from here? He talks about how a beatten child eventually will turn into the beatter, he learns it is best to be the beatter rather than the victom.
We also establish as a society a acceptable level of violence, we promote going into the military where you are trained to kill, a father uses a level of violence to dicipline a child, we have violence in our movies and all around us, violence that is seen to be within the boundry. So how can we expect to ride ourselves of all the violence in the world when we view a level of it "ok"
Sam Hamill believes our silence is our own worst enemy, in trying to hide our children from truths, a women not speaking up about her abuser, not facing the realities of the world, we are promoting the murder's and muggers, giving them free passage. We learn in his writing that Sam himself was a victim in a violent incedent. Later in life he joins the Military. He has seen both sides of the fence, the victom and the executioner.
At the end of his story he offers the idea that poetry may be a way to end the silence. It is a way to ge the truth on paper. We may not like to read or know the truth. We perfer our own reality, but we need to see the truth. Read a poem that expresses something that ay be hard to deal with but has trhe potenital to maks us better as a society. Are we really protecting ourselves by ignoring the truth.
Sam also see's poetry as a way for omeone who has been through a tramatic event such as someone who was been beat or abused, that may experience extreme anxiety, to release this emotion. They can be over whelmed with emotion and consumed by it, casuing them to act out to loved ones, paussibly violently. Poerty can act as a release, a way to express their feelings and vent your emotions, and I agree with this. Often when you read a piece of poetry you can see the author's emotions at the time he or she wrote it. Just as a musician writes a song about a lost love.
I found this to be intersting, and make you think a lot about society today. How we deal with certain stressors, and how we become they way we are. Every event in our life can be routed back to the type of person we become.
Here is more info on violence against women in the U.S. if you wish to lean more about this issue.
http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html
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