on (depressing) books
The last four books I've read have happened to be about horrible oppression and abuse of a group of people:
Coming of Age in Mississippi - about growing up black in the South in the 60s,
The Grapes of Wrath - about farmers who are forced to move West to look for work after having their farms foreclosed, and are met with violence and pitifully low wages,
What is the What - about the Lost Boys of Sudan,
and
Baghdad Burning - the blog of an Iraqi woman writing about her life in Baghdad during the US occupation.
The first three were a coincidence, but by the time I got to the fourth, I figured I was already thoroughly depressed, so I might as well keep going.
These are all amazing books, very powerful, but very difficult to read. It is incredible how easily people can justify doing horrendous things to one another. I guess it is human nature to look for differences between groups; how do we know who we are if we don't determine who were are not? And once you establish an Us vs. Them relationship, it becomes easier to rationalize that other group as somehow less than human. And of course, once you start fighting, whatever initial reason you had disappears and the reason becomes simply to fight. Nonetheless, it's hard to imagine how these things can happen. I read these books and I get so angry, and I feel so helpless to think about all the evil there is in the world and what little I can do about it.
I think the last book, Baghdad Burning, affected me the most, although it could just be the last book I read. But I think it's because it's the book that has felt the closest to me; all the others have felt more distant, in time or physical space or both, but Baghdad Burning is about a situation which is still occurring, which has occurred because of MY government. (There is still violence in Sudan as well, of course, but a large part of What is the What focuses the 1990s, and anyway, it wasn't caused by the U.S. government.) And the worst part is, the portion of the blog that was published was from 2003-2004, and it was awful reading it and knowing she still had years of horror before her. I just checked her blog -- you can read it here: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ and it stops in October of 2007. I don't know if she stopped because her family has become refugees in Syria, or because she has been killed. Both are plausible. I'm sure if I poked around on the internet I could find out what happened to her, but I really don't want to know in case it is the latter option. Just scrolling through the last few entries on her blog makes me want to cry. It's horrible.
If anyone wants to borrow any of those books (aside from What is the What because that belongs to Ms. Bissmeyer), let me know. I'm happy to share. or take a trip to your local library. Either way, I highly recommend reading any or all of them. They will certainly humble you and make you grateful for the good things you have in your life.
And as for me? I was tempted to read The Diary of Ann Frank to complete the series and drive myself into a deep depression over the state of humanity, but I wasn't sure I could really take any more...so now I'm reading Emma by Jane Austen. Nothing like some early 19th Century chick lit to lift your spirits.
Coming of Age in Mississippi - about growing up black in the South in the 60s,
The Grapes of Wrath - about farmers who are forced to move West to look for work after having their farms foreclosed, and are met with violence and pitifully low wages,
What is the What - about the Lost Boys of Sudan,
and
Baghdad Burning - the blog of an Iraqi woman writing about her life in Baghdad during the US occupation.
The first three were a coincidence, but by the time I got to the fourth, I figured I was already thoroughly depressed, so I might as well keep going.
These are all amazing books, very powerful, but very difficult to read. It is incredible how easily people can justify doing horrendous things to one another. I guess it is human nature to look for differences between groups; how do we know who we are if we don't determine who were are not? And once you establish an Us vs. Them relationship, it becomes easier to rationalize that other group as somehow less than human. And of course, once you start fighting, whatever initial reason you had disappears and the reason becomes simply to fight. Nonetheless, it's hard to imagine how these things can happen. I read these books and I get so angry, and I feel so helpless to think about all the evil there is in the world and what little I can do about it.
I think the last book, Baghdad Burning, affected me the most, although it could just be the last book I read. But I think it's because it's the book that has felt the closest to me; all the others have felt more distant, in time or physical space or both, but Baghdad Burning is about a situation which is still occurring, which has occurred because of MY government. (There is still violence in Sudan as well, of course, but a large part of What is the What focuses the 1990s, and anyway, it wasn't caused by the U.S. government.) And the worst part is, the portion of the blog that was published was from 2003-2004, and it was awful reading it and knowing she still had years of horror before her. I just checked her blog -- you can read it here: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ and it stops in October of 2007. I don't know if she stopped because her family has become refugees in Syria, or because she has been killed. Both are plausible. I'm sure if I poked around on the internet I could find out what happened to her, but I really don't want to know in case it is the latter option. Just scrolling through the last few entries on her blog makes me want to cry. It's horrible.
If anyone wants to borrow any of those books (aside from What is the What because that belongs to Ms. Bissmeyer), let me know. I'm happy to share. or take a trip to your local library. Either way, I highly recommend reading any or all of them. They will certainly humble you and make you grateful for the good things you have in your life.
And as for me? I was tempted to read The Diary of Ann Frank to complete the series and drive myself into a deep depression over the state of humanity, but I wasn't sure I could really take any more...so now I'm reading Emma by Jane Austen. Nothing like some early 19th Century chick lit to lift your spirits.