Unit 5

At the end of the first semester, I studied Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.

It was a fairly simple poem, and regarded as the first poem of the 20th century.

It talks about the retreating of the sea of human faith in the world. What once covered the world in its entirety has now been taken over by land; which represented human misery. And it also talks about how love, regardless of how powerful it is, is not even a close substitute the power of faith.

Mr. Wise asked us to reply a poignant question of "What are your views of mankind as you read this poem?" in our journals. I said this;

It makes me very depressed to think that there is hardly any faith left in the world.

And I thought at first that I wrote it in a joking manner, and that I wasn't even taking the question seriously.

I realize now that I do. Very much.

What has now become so embedded in our lives that it is hardly even questioned anymore is,

What's with this apathy?

Politicians, who were so well respected in the 18th century as to being the voice of the people, have come to be regarded as untrustworthy. e.e. cummings himself wrote that "a politician is an arse upon which everyone has set except man"

Abraham Lincoln famously said that a democracy is "a government by the people, of the people, for the people".

Whatever happened to those ideals?
And what have we done to uphold that?
Our fathers fought two world wars. For what?
And have we learned any lessons from all that?
Is this really how we honour our dead?

I myself am guilty of having societal norms in me.

I can argue with you that the idea of a market structure which fixes itself is reasonable, and to a certain point, ideal.

But what I wouldn't tell you is that I do not necessarily believe that it is for the greater good.

It has been a struggle for every single generation growing up in the 20th century to feel helpless, powerless, even apathetic to a certain extent. That's why we had the hippies in the 60s, didn't we?

We're in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We have a redundant war that will not stop anytime soon. We are rewarding greed with the bailouts, simply because they are indispensable.We live in a society which idealizes the get-rich-quick schemes. We have untrustworthy leaders. We just had another suicide bombing attack in Mumbai by people claiming themselves to be Muslims, which is completely untrue. We have 1 billion people living under a dollar all around the world. I myself ignore the fact that hundreds of innocent lives die everyday in Sudan, in Iraq, in South Africa.

Because alone, I can't do anything about it.

Matthew Arnold was right. Human misery keeps growing every single day, taking up the space that human faith once had.

But despite all this, I am surrounded by a group of people so full of faith that life just feels overflowed with it. Their optimism is so infectious, and I am grateful to be in such great company.

Yet reality hits hard.

I'm sorry, I'm just gonna keep going around in circles with this one because;

I don't have a point. I don't have an answer as to what happened which made us lose so much.

It's neverending.

I wish that this was my reply instead of the weak one I gave him.