Today, I participated in the Poor People’s Campaign, a national 40-day movement that is occurring in 36 state capitals all around the United States. Though smaller than most, the Albany one that I attended was still quite captivating, and also garnered a relative amount of attention from passerby’s and the media. While marching, I was struck by the signs that we were carrying, things like ‘water pollution is violence’ and ‘lack of sufficient health care is violent.’ Though not as simple as “truth” and “justice” like the examples given by Walzer, topics like clean water, poverty and health care are universal topics that worked to unite hundreds today in Albany, and thousands all around the nation. Not only did the campaign use the term ‘violence’ strategically to denote that the government/systemic policies are enacting violence onto people who are subjected to such oppression, they also framed these issues on a highly ‘moral’ platform. For instance one of the signs stated, “Systemic Poverty is Immoral.” By centering their mission on morality, those who are outside of this frame are therefore immoral, and position as being in the wrong. Even if the countries are not centered on continuing the struggle first started by Martin Luther King Jr 50 years ago, these conversations are not only happening nationally but also internationally as people all around the world (Puerto Rico and Gaza for instance) fight for basic human rights. In the United States, the marches used simple phrases to create an easy and fast sense of unity. The domestic campaigns themselves did not stay in the minimalist realm but also transcended to the maximalist platform through its list of demands. In that sense, the universal than became the particular, embedded specifically in the history of the United States that is so entrenched in American imperialism, capitalism and racism.

Haiti’s current issue with mass graves sheds a crucial light into what happens when the deaths and murders of those around you are not dealt with, but rather ignored and systematically silenced. The pain that individiuals have felt do not subside once the event ‘comes to a close’ but rather lingers for decades after the murder has been committed. Even though it has been 24 years since the Rwandan Genocide, those who have survived the massacre as still making their way to these mass graves in hopes of somehow identifying their loved ones in the pile of dead bodies. In Argentina, the mothers of ‘los desaparecidos’ have been searching for the answer of their children and relatives’ whereabout for forty years now. In these cases, the priority is come to terms with the unknown, the mystery surrounding what happened. Although the main focus for the survivors has been to locate the missing, this does not detract from the necessity for punitive action against those who are in power. Without this punitive action or at least some attempt to convict former torturers, there is a greater possibility for a recurrence of mass slaughter. This is currently happening in Argentina with the centre-right President, Mauricio Macri questioned the legitimacy of statistics around the dictatorship, stating that he had no idea about the true count of fatalities, “whether they were 9,000 or 30,000.” The ability for current politicians to justify and question the authenticity of clear atrocities demonstrates how necessary it is for punitive action. Instead of possibly causing democratic instability, this punitive action would ensure that democratic backsliding would be impossible because the terrorism that Argentinians felt during the dictatorship wouldn’t just be overlooked and forgotten.

In a light-hearted, very innocent way, “Please Vote for Me” uses a third grade classes’ elections for class monitor as a model to touch upon overarching aspects of manipulation in democratic elections. When watching the film, I was struck by how early on, the children were taught to seek somewhat seditious avenues in order to assure that they would instead gain legitimacy. This can be seen when the students have to point out the faults of the other candidates. Similarly, presidential candidates spend an enormous amount of money on advertisements solely meant to degrade one another. Although effective for one’s publicity, these highly expensive ads demonstrate the toxic intersectionality of economic standing and authority in the presidential process. Ultimately, if you have more money you will have the ability to technologically reach more people. This dynamic is also apparent within the movie as Lou Lei is essentially able to buy his followers by having the class go on the monorail. Although that wasn’t the only aspect that went into the childrens’ decision, I am sure that this played a crucial part in the final results, considering he won with an enormous amount of support. In contrast, Xu Xiaofei who lives in a single-parent household does not have the economic abilities to provide such an expensive trip, and comes in last. Cheng Cheng too is also crushed. This truthfully surprised me a lot. It seemed as if he had a good standing with his classmates and he was successful at riling up the class during the debates. He was able to expose Lou Lei’s abusive tendencies and yet he only received around six or eight votes. His loss demonstrates the reluctancy for voters to break away from the norm. Lou Lei had already been class monitor for some time, and regardless of how they were mistreated, the students still voted for him.

While watching the film, I wondered a lot about the authenticity of what we were watching. This reminded me of how James C. Scott questioned the legitimacy of his own results considering people who are analyzed may act a different way than how they might usually act. I doubt that all of it was fabricated but I do think there were some parts that were subconsciously exaggerated for the cameras.

Reading the parable, The Grocer and the Chief, I kept asking myself why the Chief and the Grocer pose so much difficulty for Tosun. Tosun, a young scholar from Ankara, was searching for a Balgat that represented the “deadening past rather than the brave quite new world.” (47) At first glance it seemed as if he succeeded at finding this dreamy desolate place of his imagination. He states, “I have seen quite a lot of villages in the barren mountainous East, but never such a colorless, shapeless dump. This was the reason I chose the village. It could have been half an hour to Ankara by car if it had a road, yet it is about two hours to the capital by car without almost any road and is just forgotten, forsake, right under our noses.” (48) In his respondents, Tosun strived to find people who paralleled the same desolate atmosphere he perceived in Balgart; however, two of his interviewees–the Chief and the Grocer–vehemently rejected these caricatures. This highlights Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness, and the ways in which people combat or submit to hegemonic ideas of what it means to be a resident of a certain location, socioeconomic class, race; etc. These two figures embody the extremes of a spectrum: a a full rejection of tradition and the full acceptance of it. Tosun describes the chief as having “some sort of useless, mystic wisdom” (48)–a “vibrant sound box through which the traditional Turkish virtues may resonantly echo. The chief embodies an acceptance of his surrounding as he believes God ahs given him all that he needs. In this way, the Chief embodies a paradox that Tosun was not suspecting because the Chief is content with and prideful of what Tosun sees as a desolate, gray and dust-filled area. In contrast, the Grocer rejects the traditions that the Chief hold so dear. In its place, the Grocer “lives in a different world–an expansive world, populated more actively with imaginings and fantasies, hungerings for whatever is different and unfamiliar.” (49) In this way, Tosun embodies an interesting juxtaposition of living in an area that is not “modernized” and yet hopeful of a modern period. Because Tosun is searching for people who are representative of this forsaken, forgotten reality but instead finds someone who is wanting to create a village that no longer just “stays in their holes.” (49) This relationship causes a friction that is hard for Tosun to digest.

I’d also like to highlight that it is easy to assume that this story depicts a city’s evolution away from God and religion, but I would like to push back on that idea. Without a doubt, the transition, causes new values of capitalism and autonomous success to supersede that of the smaller villages’ connection to one another but this does not destabilize their faith in God. When talking about the the Grocer, one man stated, “Ah, he was the cleverest of us all. We did not know it then, but he saw better than all what lay in the path ahead. We have none like him among us now. He was a prophet.” (56) This sentimentality evokes Christian scriptural reference as prophets became the hated but eventually admired guides f Israel’s existence. Even with the introduction of bus services and radio stations, the centuries old language of religion can not be taken away from these people. The way in which they understand the world is still through a lens of religion and God. Therefore, the sacred and the profane are not as separated as we might assume. Instead, these two spheres of reality are very much intertwined with one another’s existence. Although the “Grocer was dead” … “the Chief–the last Muhtar of Balgat”–had reincarnated the Grocer in the flesh of his sons.” (56) In this way, the sacred created the profane but that the profane also created the sacred.

In Masha Gressen’s article “The Dying Russians”, the Russian-American journalist hopes to find the cause for the high mortality rate of Russians post-downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Truth be told, I am no expert on Russian history nor the the government’s transition to capitalism, but even without this context, it is easy to see the pitfalls of Gressen’s conclusion. Gressen begins with a prolific description of her experience in Russia in 1993 and her aghast shock over people’s complacency over the growing death rates of their country. Transitioning from this narrative, she goes onto negate countless attempts by specialists like Michelle Parsons and Nicholas Eberstadt who have worked to answer the questions by looking at poverty rates, lack of health care, economic turmoil, diseases, diets, drinking and more. Half of her essay deals with discrediting empirical evidence of strife in the country, but only two paragraphs of her article is dedicated to “proving” her eventual, oversimplified conclusion: Russians are dying because they just lack hope! Who would have known? She doesn’t give enough historical background when she focuses in on the Gorbachev period and the Khrushcev era so her arguments about how “intensive housing construction” correlated to people being inspired to “have babies as well” seemed contrived and rushed. Moreover, she concludes that this depression has become so imbedded in Russian society that there is a possibility that Russians are now intrinsically born with hopelessness. Following this she states, “Is it also possible that other post-Soviet states, by breaking off from Moscow, have reclaimed some of their ability to hope, and this is why even Russia’s closest cultural and geographic cousins, such as Belarus and Ukraine, aren’t dying off as fast?” Strategically dramatic or not, her last few sentences work more against her than for her. Ultimately, Gressen’s rushed articles proves the importance of establishing a thesis that is driven by tenacious research than solely basing itself on paring down other’s work.

What I think is most important to analyze in George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant are the feelings Orwell elicited throughout the story as he is tasked to shoot the elephant. What Orwell is getting at is that by being an Englishman–white and representing (though not willingly) British imperialism–he is forced to act as “an absurd puppet” to the “yellow faces behind.” Although he states that he is secretly against the Burmese Oppressors, his vocabulary suggests that his hatred for the Burmese citizens far exceeds that of the “dirty work of Empire.” Ultimately, this–what I presume–fictitious hatred towards the British, is superseded primarily by an anger and frustration with the Burmese who fail to give him the respect he feels he deserves.

When confronted with the problem of the once rampaging elephant, Orwell decides to shoot the animal not due to an allegiance towards his occupation as a police officer nor a feeling of retribution considering the elephant did kill someone, but rather due to the mere fear of being laughed at by the “natives” who are, in that society, below him. I ascertain that this feeling of (absurd) “fear” and “vulnerability” is exacerbated by the fact that those who surrounded him are of a lower class than him. The idea that his façade performance of dominance will be exposed for its real weakness, is unacceptable for Orwell, a man who has been given the power to decide who or what lives or dies based upon his rank as an official. This pivotal exposure demonstrates the varying and dichotomous stakes of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. In total, whether or not Orwell shoots the elephant, the only thing at stake is his pride. He understands this but does not understand how ludicrous and comical it is; rather he accepts the role he feels he needs to play and shoots the elephant. Only once the gun is shot and the huge animal staggers at the sudden blow, does this “veil” of the dominant fall from Orwell’s eyes. Unlike what Orwell expected however, the animal does not die immediately, but instead half an hour later and only after couple of more bullets had been shot into its rough skin. During this process, Orwell seems to believe that he is taking the higher road by trying to quell the anguished cries of the poor beast. And yet when he can no longer deal with the elephant’s whimpers, Orwell leaves–unwilling and unable to accept the consequences of his actions. And to think that all of this could have never happened if only he had the will to get over a fear of ridicule.

Though getting at an extremely important subject–education justice–Gatto in Against School ultimately misses the mark with the overarching issue and its subsequent solution. Starting off with a relatable issue in many classrooms, the feeling of boredom, Gatto uses the backdrop of his thirty years in the public school system to segue into a conversation about the true purpose of education or rather the lack thereof. Gatto paints a picture strikingly similar to Lois Lowry’s The Giver where students are heavily patrolled, analyzed and eventually funneled into a system that teaches them conformity rather than dissidence. Alexander Inglis, author of Principles of Secondary Education, details six functions of the education system: the adjustice or adapative function, the integrating function, the diagnostic and directive function, the differentiating function and the selective function. I can see some truths to each of these potential functions (some more than others) but the following parts of Gatto’s article is where I feel he lacked to really seek revolutionary, radical change. The solution to America’s education problem is not to abandon education entirely nor is it only to “teacher your own to be leaders and adventurers”, it is a drastic and systematic change to the current state of public education. For one, we have to talk critically about The Common Core, a national education system that sets out specific guidelines/benchmarks for school systems to attain in mathematics, the sciences, and literacy. This strategic form of education manipulatively sets itself off as an equalizing factor for all states, but actually it just forces the education system to focus more on standardized testing and test preparation than an actual intellectual experience–hence what Gatto is pointing at. In this process, those who are unable to afford test preparation get left behind. In addition, public schools are highly underfunded and under resourced which becomes a breeding ground for students who will be systematically ignored and stigmatized. But the answer to the lack of opportunities in the public schools is not privatization. Students should be able to acquire an all-encompassing education that sets them up for intellectual success without parents having to dish out $50,000 every year. These elitist institutions will bring in students of color and students from low-income backgrounds in hopes of creating more “equal opportunities” and “diversifying” the school but failing to provide spaces in which these students can succeed both academically and emotionally. All in all, Gatto understands the importance of rewiring our education system but this can not just happen on an individual level as he seems to insist, this radical transformation must occur on a wide-scale level in which the future of our students as self-governing, highly-motivated individuals will be placed at the forefront of the movement.