NewYorker 3/20

First of all - that reading for homework was brutal - the pages were single paragraphs, making it very hard on the eyes, and making me almost anxious while reading, as I kept wanting and anticipating a break in the page. However, they did manage to say quite a lot, and some of it was complicated. Today's class would have helped clarify better, for me at least, if we did not break up into groups. It is so hard to discuss the quotes with classmates, because we are never sure if we are saying the right thing, or something even close to the author's intention. It is also harder when people you are paired with did not do the reading, or if they are as clueless as you are. I like the discsussion better when you present it to us first, and we discuss as a whole class together (which is what we wound up doing at the end anyway).
One of the quotes that really interested me that we spoke about was, · “amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness” (57). I never realized how true this is, and we do this constantly, maybe on a daily basis. When it hit me though was when you showed the characters from South Park. I've only seen the one about Starvin Marvin, so what you said about it I agree with - there are actually people in Ethiopia that look like that, because they are malnutritioned and die rather quickly. It is a true and awful subject, yet here we are in America, poking fun at it by making a cartoon character out of a sad issue. But it is amusing to us, so we push back the sad realities of life to get a quick laugh or enjoy the show being presented to us. We do become powerless, unless we act out and taking a stand saying that it is wrong. But this is such a hard thing to do, especially when it is one versus many - change may be very slow, or even unattainable.