On Scales

As some of you may know, I think about the strange, strange idea of 'appreciation' a lot. It's so weird though, because just when you think you've thought about something so much, you're getting sick of it (VIS 111 case in point), life throws some extra sour lemons at you.

Wednesday, I found out about someone I know who was diagnosed with a certain fatal disease.

Friday, I found out about a terrifying and alarming incident on campus that targeted a certain ethnic group of people with a life-threatening symbol.

This morning, I found out about an 8.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated a certain part of South America.

Progressively, through this week I have found myself thinking of appreciation again, but on a whole new scale. My idea of appreciation is to step into someone's shoes, if not for just one minute: to think, to feel, to try to know pain that you may never experience - I think that's the ultimate form of appreciation. This week, I've become someone afraid of losing their loved one, someone afraid of their own campus, someone afraid of being homeless. Of course, I've only tried to know what it feels like and I know that I can never really know. But the fact that I am pained just by witnessing these events tells me that the victim's levels of pain must truly be unbearable. These scales of personal, racial, and global tragedies seemed to put me in my place. Disease, racism, natural disasters: these are out of my hands. I couldn't help but to feel helpless these past couple of days.

My favorite part of this week was taking a jab at one of these problems. My apartment mate, Jezli, and I wrote letters to several people concerning the hanging of a noose in our campus library. We're expressing our support of the House Bill H.R. 70, Noose Hate Crime Act of 2009, which would make hanging a noose in public with intent to harass or intimidate a person a federal offense. Here are some names to write to if you would like to join us: Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. We just hope that something like this will never happen again. I am only one person and these are only letters, but then again up until 40 years ago, the moon was only impossible to walk on.