Personal Insight Questions

Personal Insight Questions I think it may be the moral certainty we now have about that war. Nazis are evil, we know that now, or at least many of us do, but at the time, the war raged for three years before the United States entered. Even when we finally joined we only declared war on the Nazis in response to their declaration of war on us. Clever minds like Lehrer, Vonnegut, and Heller looked at Americans patting themselves on the back after the war, as if we had won a moral victory. The D’aulaire’s take on Greek tales gives sweetness and life to staggeringly human stories while still painting characters in divine light. Although gods, the heroes of Olympus would make mistakes, get angry, and fall in love. This basic principle that even gods made mistakes allowed me to process my everyday life. Although divorce is not an issue of the gods, they fell in and out of love and this was synonymous with events in my own life, and with members of my own family. As a small child, I did not fully grasp the implications of translation and the issues that arise from recitation. Now, as a student of Latin, I understand the strain of translation. No two translations are ever the same, usually due to the education and bias of the translator. The D’aulaire’s remain true to the wildly complex myths of Ancient Greece while crafting an accessible book for children. While arguments with my brother could never be described as divine, our struggles often reminded me of the fights between Apollo and Artemis, siblings who squabbled but ultimately loved each other. The story of Orpheus, the musician who looked back at the last second to ensure his beloved was following him, remains a non-example in matters of perseverance. This book is foundational to me because of its portrayal of divine creatures and the exhibition of basic human desires and imperfections. I was trapped in a classroom where my peers could only see one truth, one dimension of a book because they hadn’t read it. I can already see itâ€"myself, sitting in classrooms where everyone wants to be thereâ€"where I am not being measured, rated, scored, and I can learn through communicating, not testing. Where Johnnies not only question my truths, but theirs too. The same people who hadn’t wanted to fight the Nazis in 1939 or earlier were now congratulating themselves for defeating them. I can see aspects of both Yosarian and Clevenger in myself. I may not agree with the goal we pursue or how we try to reach it, but if I am given a job to do I will do it thoroughly and with all my effort. Pashtuns are the ethnic group that make up a majority of the fighters in that country and they have a system of core beliefs that make one a Pashtun called Pashtunwali. One aspect of this is Badal, or retribution, essentially meaning that if someone harms or even insults a friend or family member it is your duty as a Pashtun to take revenge, generally by spilling blood. Because of this, for every fighter we kill, we create a whole family of new fighters. Like Yosarian I think it is important to question my reality, and view what I am told is “common sense” with skepticism. While Clevenger just blindly believed and followed what he was told was patriotic, Yosarian questioned why a bunch of people he didn’t know wanted to kill him. The aspect of Clevenger that I identify with is not the blind followership, but followership nonetheless. This never-ending cycle is the reason Afghans have been fighting almost constantly since 1979. This is why I think that “warheads on foreheads” is strategically counterproductive. Being given the Sisyphean task of killing our way out of an insurgency, the only response I can have is to work very hard to be sure that the warheads are landing on the right foreheads. The Yosarian in me changes the question from “How do we succeed? ” to “How do we minimize the loss of civilian and allied life while we inevitably fail? ” The Clevenger in me responds to this new question with a sense of patriotic, even divine, duty. So, must all beauty be false and can truth only come ugly? Then, how does one interpret morality in relation to beauty?