The books we read this quarter were super valuable for this class but also to my life. I want to look directly at Illuminations by Walter Benjamin.

Taken from The Storyteller:

“Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More an more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battle grown silent– not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” Pg. 83-84

It’s true that I find in my daily life many instances of our lacking of value in experience. Newspapers depict the same information told over and over again, recycling the use of someone else’s work. Media coverage is overused just like newspapers. We rarely ask about people’s experiences to help us in understanding a situation. Everything is seen under a closed view of what we picture a situation has to look like, held under a tight veil.

This passage really speaks to exactly what I want to do and I’ve realized this throughout the class. I want to write. I always have but I really want to write to share peoples life stories and how those stories can create a bigger picture. The voices of those that haven’t been able to speak up are a foundation to build up from.

We are surrounded by media that depicts pictures of what I don’t want our country to be. The types of things we decide to talk about on newspapers, television, and ad’s are not what our country should be like. I don’t want to live in a country that is so divided on things that seem simple to me, that all lives matter, or every person has the decision to make their body what they want. I want to be in a country that knows these things already, when the transition to change isn’t so dramatic. People’s lives matter and their stories are ones that can help us change as a whole.