Rain Will Make the Flowers Grow

Rain falls

It beats against the world

Trees,

Houses,

Roads,

They all feel its unrelenting pace.

The world screams

“I want sun!”

For they can only see that which is wrong.

The sea when it rains is beautiful

The sky when it rains is joyous

that which it gives is life giving

Struggle gives life meaning

Rain makes the flowers grow

From the pouring rain comes

Waterfalls

Fields

Gardens

Trees which bear fruit

From the storm comes the waters of spring,

the floodwaters comes rich soil,

the soil comes new life

So while the world rages against the rain

I will rejoice in the storm,

because of the fruit the heavy winds

and the pouring rain

Produce in me.

I will give praise for the kindness,

love,

strength,

and wisdom,

That is nurtured by the rain

For rain will make the flowers grow

One of Those Days

One of Those Days

It's one of those days

One of those days where I

Take that which I love

And scream bloody murder at it

Threatening it silently to never pick it up again

It’s one of those days

Where I see emptiness

I'm not going home

Where's the golden fields?

Where's the dream?

Oh right.

I just beat it down

It's one of those days

Where I feel nothing

Not hurt

Not sorrow

Not pain

Not joy

Not anything

And oh Lord,

Oh precious Lord!

I just want to feel again!

I want to feel your love in my heart

Not only anger

I want that never ending hope

But I find only sadness

Why are you silent

Oh God of my fathers?

Why do you not speak?

Why can I not hear you?

Why can I not feel you,

Even though I know you are near?

Why does the Lord of creation

not answer my prayer?

Oh sweet Jesus,

Have mercy on me

And let me feel again!

It's one of those days I guess.

When I am in the lion's den.

It doesn't look any different.

Sky is still the ever present blue

Sun is still shining

But there is no love

There is no kindness

There is only the

emptiness of the lives

of the people around me

And Lord I am begging you

I have come before your throne

I beseech you

to pour your love into me

So that I might feel again

So that I might smile at the emptiness

Glad that you are there

For though you are silent

Through the trial

And through the storm

You have given me a boat

On which I can sail

I can sail until I reach the end

Until the sweet embrace of my Lord

Takes me home.

Until then

I will stand before your throne

I will stand before it

with humble pleas

For the lost

For the broken

For the weary

For the downcast

For the lonely

For the hurt

For I was all of those things

I still feel as if I am that way

But even though I may be in the midst of the vilest of storms

You are there

And oh sweet and merciful God

You hear my pleas

You hear them from unclean lips

And father,

Oh father,

I cannot wait to run home to you

I cannot wait to run home to you

And be swept up by loving arms

And so I bow.

And I plea

And I weep.

Bring my brothers home Lord!

Bring my sisters back sweet Jesus!

And I will be here, forever knelt,

At your feet until then

And oh merciful Lord

Oh,

I cannot wait to run home to you

           It simply just must be one of those days 

The Quickest Road That Leads to Rome

Jennifer Hyde

Ms. Shingara

English 3

19 April 2017

The Quickest Road That Leads to Rome

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). The system, is it not lovely? Is it not the people in it that keep law and order in an otherwise anarchical world? Yes. Kesey would agree as well. Rules and laws, consequences and rewards, all are in control of the system. It keeps the order of the land, which is usually quite fine. Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Follow the fold, stray no more. Then everything is fine. Kesey would agree to that, for he does not promote total anarchy. If man is to follow the fold (a flock of sheep) and never stray, he might reach heaven on earth one day. So why, one might ask, does Kesey challenge the reader’s ingrained instinct to conform? It is simply because people are sheep. People can be willfully ignorant, foolhardy, cowardly, and frankly imbecilic at times, no matter how enlightened we may think we are. We see the established order as good or evil depending upon which is the popular opinion to hold at the moment. We conform to the status quo to obtain our beloved comfort, security, and the pursuit of happiness, even when the system is evil to the core. When the powers that be resemble not God but the Devil, the vast majority of man says that it is the 50’s, the 60’s, the 90’s, the 2000’s, and that it is what it is. Society keeps a tight leash, with its peer pressure easily exertable upon the human sheep who have a tendency to embrace the imbecilic. The technique used by society’s devilish minds can be used to rebel against those said minds when their power grows great, with the written word and all forms of art being powerful tools of peer pressure. Kesey himself is using it in his book, in which he rightfully begs us to open our eyes, for the Devil could be knocking at our front door asking us to vote him into office.

So? We can be sheep for society as long as the ideals presented are in our favor. It is great to feel as if one is the societal choir master. Being on the side of the establishment is a perfectly fine thing while the establishment is good. Kesey doesn’t argue against that. What he argues is that the peer pressure from one man may be enough to change the world, for the better or worse.  That is what he himself is trying to do. He is using the pressure exerted system upon our conscience by his novel to get at least one person to agree with him, much like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which was written to inspire the colonists to rebel. If one person agrees, the idea can burst into flame. Society uses this against us to force the sheep into the pen. There may be still waters and green pastures there, or there may be brambles and wolves depending upon whether the Shepherd of society is good or not. Your two front runners in Kesey’s race are McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. In the first part of the novel, Good Shepherd McMurphy pushes peer pressure upon the patients, who are willfully sheeplike, to defy the authority of the Big Nurse in order to watch the World Series. It works so well that he can get them to pretend to watch said game while they are in the process of being screamed at by the Nurse. “If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch were crazy as loons” (Kesey 128). McMurphy is able to get these weak willed and easily frightened men to commit an act of defiance against their Devil, an act so infuriating her nails dig into her palms and draw blood. It works to make the system in the hospital fall into McMurphy’s way of thinking, for better or worse. In the same way, our society can be changed by the pressure of one man or woman to do this or that, whatever happens to be their goal, for better or for worse. Peer pressure can be a powerful influence for the system.

And people are so willfully blind they let themselves get swayed! So long as they have some thing that they want, people will let themselves be led into the pen! Take the Roman plebeians. They could vote, and the Senators knew that. So they courted the mob’s favor, much like politicians had done long before them and have been doing ever since, per panem et circenses, with bread and games to satisfy the people. They gave them food and welfare as well as sponsoring the gladiator games. So as long as these demands were met, the Senators had their vote. In the same way, people today and in the 60’s will follow whatever makes them feel better, whatever gives them what they want. So, Kesey says, use this! Don’t let it just be the system changing hands that use this technique! Use it to say no to the system. Peer pressure plays upon a person’s will, conscience, and fear. McMurphy used that to his advantage with all the men when trying to get them to go on the fishing trip. He talks to Chief specifically to get his confidence up to go on the trip, promising to make Chief so tall he’ll be  “takin’ ten feet at a step and duckin’ for telephone wire” (190). Incentive with a bit of pressure, pushing on his fear of not getting big enough. Sure enough, Chief agrees. People are sheep, putty in the hands of a master, if the same peer pressure used by society to mold us all into what it believes a good citizen is used by the master. People cave very quickly, much more than we would like to admit, with a little push mixed with temptation in a term we blind sheep coined as peer pressure.

Well then. Why rebel? If we are sheep in the hands of a good shepherd, why change that now? Fair enough. But what if the shepherd doesn't care for the sheep, or maybe he does, but is evil? What if the system is hurting those in it? What happens then? The people are still sheep. The Acutes are aware of the evil of Nurse Ratched, but they do nothing to help. “ ‘Hell of a life. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Puts man in one confounded bind, I’d say’ ” (155). That's what people say. They shirk duty to get rid of evil until it's almost impossible to discern between the two, and then evil becomes good. That is what Kesey is trying to get us all to realize. The system has a tendency to become evil, and we need to watch out for that to happen. We must be constantly aware of the fact that people have a predilection to welcome evil into their lives if it benefits them; if it gives them control or riches or fame, people will welcome evil. That is de facto, a reality of life. The problem is when those same people get into the system, when they get into the top of the societal hierarchy. When those who allow evil to flourish control the system, that is when the system goes awry. Nurse Ratched’s manipulations of the patients are evil to the point where a few pointed sentences cause Billy Bibbit to commit suicide, and the blame is then placed on those who are trying to do good! “ ‘Playing with human lives, gambling with human lives, as if you thought yourself to be a God!’ ” (266). Nurse claims that she is trying to help Billy, to help the patients, and that McMurphy is killing them. Woe to her and to those who follow her, for they are trading good for evil. Kesey is warning us that this must change in his time, and be prevented in our time, or evil will triumph and then woe to those who, as Benjamin Franklin once said, traded “essential liberty for temporary security” for they were the ones to let evil reign supreme.

All roads lead to Rome, or so goes the old saying. And indeed, all roads in the massive Empire led to its magnificent city. However the actual Roman Empire, as a society, rotted from the inside before the city state that had conquered the world fell. Evil people like the Emperor Nero who burned the city in order to remake it to his liking and blamed Christians for it, or hard times like the Year of the Four Emperors following Nero’s suicide, horrible ways of conducting politics such as sponsorship of the gladiator games and paying off whatever citizens a Senator could and vice versa, and general allowance of evil to permeate their Empire shaped the Roman system into a horrific beast that eventually split and fell. We are Rome now. We, as a nation and culture, admire Roman advances in freedom, which were advanced for the time for her freemen, her architecture, her science and engineering, her relative progressivism for the time, her orators, and her days as a Republic. Kesey was one of the first to comment on this using his novel in the twentieth century. He saw us as quickly allowing the system to become evil, and begged for the sheep to open their eyes and go look for a Good Shepherd such as McMurphy. Allowing those same evils to permeate our society will only push us closer to Rome - closer to the inevitable fall of our nation. But there is hope to avoid that fate for a little while longer. Look at the society objectively, and don’t allow the evil to take control even more. If worse comes to worst and we enter into the same cycle that Rome did, then fight back. Fight back with the same pressure that society uses on you. Write, sing, act, speak, dance, do whatever is necessary and fight! The patriots would have lost their revolution if not for Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. It might not even have begun! But every person has a responsibility to not simply say, to paraphrase Kesey, “I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t.”, and then decide to stay where they are comfortable, but instead to recognize the evil around them and say “Enough!”. Yes, Kesey may be one of the few bold enough to say “I don’t care, I’ll do it anyways.”, but that does not take away from the fact that he is correct. For all roads lead to Rome. France is Egypt. England is Greece. America is Rome. And we will always be taking a path to Rome. Evil is always going to be ahead of us. There will always be new evils, new people trying to manipulate the sheep, but that does not mean we can simply sit back and watch. For that is the quickest path to Rome. It is what the Romans themselves did. And, by all that is good and holy, Kesey is begging us to stop, look around and think! Conform to what is right. Leave that alone. Don’t be like the Romans who eventually saw evil as good and good as evil. Conform to society, but be on guard for those who would like to shape America and her society into something unrecognizable. Stop and look around before we take the quickest road to Rome, and end up plunging the world into another Dark Age.

Pro Quid Mori

Pro quid Mori?

What does one die for?

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Death by lobotomy was a certainty. Whoever one was before would be gone-that is, if he survived- and was left as a ‘vegetable’. Crucifixion was much the same in that regard. If one were nailed or tied to that piece of wood for defying Rome or whatever provincial authority he had upset, he wouldn’t return. Whichever one was administered, it was a terrible fate. For centuries, millennia truly, defying the established evil in the world has been, and continues to be, an act for which one receives death, figuratively or literally. For an author so despising of conformity, it makes little sense for him to show his reader that the price for their war is battles that no matter their worthy goal, they will not win. Even the ultimate symbol of nonconformity that is the Christ, whom McMurphy represents, went to the Cross. The Cup of Deliverance boasts a heavy price, one many are not willing to pay. There are two battles in Part IV, which have been brewing for the last three sections, one won by the Nurse and the other by McMurphy. Truly, their battles are mere games of chess for our author, showing the price for defying that which has been established, and for defying the evil that lies behind it.

McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are as opposite as Jesus and the Devil themselves, and as such, wage a war of ideals against the other until only one is left standing. But as in every war, there is always more than one battle, and this war consists primarily of two, both of which culminate in Part IV. History shows that when fighting on two fronts, one of those will be lost Napoleon conquered almost all of Europe but failed in Russia. The Kaiser won Russia but failed on the Western front. Had Normandy failed, the Allies would have lost the Western front of WWII. One cannot divide himself and hope to conquer, even if you are R.P. McMurphy. His first battle was over his body, his life, and his freedom. It did not end until the Nurse played her final hand: lobotomy. “As the hours passed [...] I can see more and more guys strolling over to look at the face” (Kesey, 270). There, that battle ended. Chief knew deep inside of him about both battles-it is why he stuck around after McMurphy was taken to Disturbed for the final time, and it’s why he helped him escape. He stuck around to survey the battlefield of the second, and to McMurphy, the more important battle. Chief saw the effect the patients had on McMurphy. They forced him to fight for them as they could not fight for themselves. On a more symbolic level, he fought to free the men (humanity) from the grip of the twisted world that Nurse Ratched (the Devil) had created. The men he had been trying to save had been voluntary- they came there of their own free will- which meant he needed them to leave of their own free will. To take off humanity’s willful blindfold when it comes to evil. “We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it” (267). The patients knew at the end why he had been fighting all along. They all knew of the first battle; they had encouraged him in it and tried to help him escape. But until the end of that battle, no one had known that there was even a second, greater battle that the author placed in there to be honest with the reader about what he was trying to get them to do, to be honest about the fact that there would be consequences.

Some might roll their eyes at the fact that he fought two battles at the same time in Part IV. Why would it matter? He still lost. Yes, he did still lose his first battle. He lost the Eastern front, if you will. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. McMurphy lost his life. He never escaped. He never won his freedom. He was lobotomized-the gambling, drinking, whoring cowboy that was McMurphy was dead. The captain of that ship was fallen, fallen cold and dead. His body might have existed, but everything that made Mack, well Mack, was gone. So what that he lost? So what that the Christ figure gave up his life? So what? He lost his first battle; he fought it until his friend had to kill him. Dulce et decorum est pro corpus mori, no? It is sweet and honorable to die for oneself, is it not? Your author says no. Fighting nonconformity to fight nonconformity is pointless. Fighting for yourself will be a fight in which you cannot win if you are trying to fight against conformity, for it has all the cards in that respect. Jail, slander, execution, crucifixion; whatever it might take to silence you, conformity has the power to do it. If your only cause is to help yourself, you will not win. Who would follow you, who would give you the momentum to have any success if your only concern is yourself? You would have no allies, no nothing to help you. Fighting conformity for yourself can never succeed.

But what of McMurphy’s other battle? His battle where it is safe to say his motto was dulce et decorum est pro amicus mori, it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s friend? What of that one? Again, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It is entirely too obvious. Even though McMurphy went from having “iron in his bare heels” that rang “sparks out of the tile” (267) to the Disturbed Ward in a short period of time, McMurphy’s goal was complete in the laughter of the men of the ward. It was complete in the once sentence Billy could speak without stuttering. It was complete when Harding could take Nurse’s paper and shred it saying “ ‘Lady, I think you are full of so much bullshit’ ” (269). It was complete when most of the Acutes left the ward for good. It was complete when a paranoid schizophrenic escaped the ward. McMurphy fought and fought for these patients who could not fight for themselves, for they were so deep into the clutches of the Devil in the microcosm of her own world that the Nurse had created. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est, still holds true for this Jesus figure. Where charity and love are, God is, and that is where McMurphy won. When he had a reason to fight the conformity that had nothing to do with himself, and indeed, got McMurphy killed figuratively and literally, he won. He tore open the veil and let the men of the ward see. He silenced the Devil, taking her by the throat and strangling her. At the cost of his life, McMurphy won the battle for the hearts and minds of the men. He won the battle to save them, and Kesey warns his reader of the consequences and reminds them of the rewards of trying to pull off such a feat. If one tries to fight conformity, if one tries to fight the evil that usually follows behind in conformity’s wake, he will risk his life to open the eyes of the hearts of men. If you are going to try to change things, you need to be prepared to give your life and never see your goal come to fruition, as it is incredibly likely you will fail in your lifetime. People are mortal, but your ideas are not, and those will carry through, though the toll might very well be your life. Charity indeed.

Why though? Why on God’s green earth does that matter? Why does it matter that the head is only bruised in this book for the Serpent, yet the heel of Jesus is crushed along with the rest of his body? Why would Kesey write a book to tell the reader that you will probably fail should you decide to undertake this quest? Why does it matter that this will most likely cost you your life if you take up the cause for another, and absolutely will cost you your life if you take up the quest solely to help yourself? It is simply because both of these battles and their outcomes are a critique on humanity. Recently the United States’ ambassador to the U.N. asked Russia’s ambassador “How many more shall die before Russia cares?” That sentence is true for all humanity. Kesey looks at us and asks “Why must someone die before you will even help his cause? He fights for a righteous cause yet you refuse to look! Why? How many more lives will it cost for man to open the eyes of his heart and say ‘Here I am! Send me!’?” Indeed, how many more times must evil become the norm? How many more times must the veil be torn before it is never sewn shut again? How many more lives will it cost before man looks deep inside his soul to find the root of his evil? How many more times will there be a need for a Savior to awaken man from his willful blindness? How much longer must a man look at another man and say “ ‘As if you thought yourself to be a God!’ ” (266) when he himself is a demon playing at being God? How much longer will it take for man to turn from evil and ask himself, “For what good in the world is there that is worth fighting for? For what would I die?”

By the Narrow Gate

By the Narrow Gate

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.  For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14). Many think of a funeral as a remembrance of the deceased, of who they were and what they stood for, that a funeral is for the deceased. That is true to some extent, however it is a last gift to the lives a person had touched, in order that they may think of the good of the deceased, to remember them one last time as they were. Gatsby, the man with the spirit of the pioneers, of the pilgrims, and of those who dreamed of a land called America, is dead. And all who are left to mourn his passing are his father, a man who loves books, Gatsby’s servants, and one outsider. The funeral Gatsby is given mourns not only the man, but the Spirit of America, constantly seeking opportunity, expansion, and second chances. Seeking these things after the atrocities of the Last Great War, however, lead to the subtle intrusion of evil into one’s dreams and actions which are corrupted by laziness, carelessness, and obsession. They poisoned the Spirit of America’s search for the dream, and in turn, killed them. Fitzgerald, who participates in his novel in the guise of all knowing outsider Nick Carraway, watched the Greatest Nation on Earth as an outsider in Paris, and as he wrote his book, he was watching its funeral be ignored.

    Opportunity is part of the founding of America; the belief that if one has it in them to do great things and is willing to work hard enough for it, one should have the opportunity to do so. The only thing that can counter the more than three thousand miles of opportunity is laziness, the kind where honest and hard work such as getting a second job or doing work others are not willing to do is forgotten in light of the wide and easy path. Criminal activity such as bootlegging, a fact about Gatsby given to us by an angry Tom when he says that he “ ‘picked him out for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn't far wrong.’ ” (Fitzgerald 118), breeds that sort of laziness because it blurs the line between right and wrong. Breaking the law is not the honest work which America was built upon. Gatsby’s moral laziness in working for Meyer Wolfshiem chokes his opportunity. He has the potential to succeed, but instead gives it up for a quick buck and dishonest work. Fitzgerald uses Wolfshiem’s corruption of Gatsby’s dream to show that evil can come in many forms, and most of the time one does not know or does not care that it has them in his grasp until it is too late. Once the deed is done and the dream is corrupted, Laziness does not even bother to look back and instead moves on. It won’t come to its victim’s funeral. It doesn’t come to the funeral of the real America. It simply moves on to continue corrupting the little America that is left.

    Keeping on the straight and narrow is no easy task; especially when one’s want to expand is immediately brought down by carelessness. Expansion is doing better than one was given or giving one’s children a better life, which are good things, but when one starts letting their misdeeds fall by the moral wayside, the dream and America start to become crippled. Fitzgerald uses Jordan and the Buchanans to illustrate his point that America doesn’t stand, can’t stand, if her sons and daughters enter through the wide gate. If her own children cannot care about the people they hurt, then the American Dream becomes evil. “She was dressed to play golf and I remember her looking like a good illustration” (151). Your literary Fitzgerald that is Nick Carraway, the all knowing outsider, says that Jordan is fake. She is only an illustration, an impossible dream for people to seek but never find. She has been at Gatsby’s parties, and along with her accomplices, has sunk her claws into his life, and just like Laziness, she and her companions refuse to attend Gatsby’s funeral, even though they have left him as careless as Nick describes the Buchanans to be. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (153). Their carelessness affected Gatsby and the American Spirit Fitzgerald made him to be, causing him to be reckless and spend money to impress a person he could never have. He broke the law, and became a bootlegger with connections to the mob in order to try and reach his dream, which had become crippled by his carelessness. America and her dream were being choked by Laziness and crippled by Carelessness, yet neither even bothered to come to the funeral.

    A second chance is every man’s dream at one time or another. Maybe with a lover or a job opportunity or maybe with poor life choices. Pilgrims, debtors, pioneers, outcasts, they all came for that second chance. A possibility to start over in life when they couldn’t find it elsewhere. The second chance was Gatsby’s hope, his dream, his everything. World War I had killed his first chance. He needed the second one. Gatsby craved that second chance so much it became his obsession.  He let his morals fall, connected with the mob, and smuggled alcohol just to have her, the woman he obsessed over so much that Nick, our author in disguise, “wouldn’t have been surprised to see the sinister faces, the faces of “Wolfshiem’s people”, behind him [Gatsby]” (125). Obsession has changed America so much that Fitzgerald is unable to recognize her without all the evil. Obsession over money, cars, love, and keeping up with the Joneses, has made the dream into a disturbing thing that is sucking the life out of America and eventually after a night spent in obsession and alcohol, kills her. America, Gatsby, the Dream, and the American Spirit, are all dead. The evils of the War to End All Wars have destroyed it. And obsession has died along with America, unable to attend the funeral.

    For everyone who did not come to the funeral, there were people there. Nick was there, (Fitzgerald is organizing a funeral within and with his novel). George Washington, the Father of America, was there alongside Nick. Owl Eyes, the man who loves libraries and wears glasses is also in attendance as Benjamin Franklin in disguise, the man who pushed for America for many years before it came into fruition. The rest of the attendees were made up of Gatsby (America)’s servants, which could easily be the men and women who have served this great nation and her dream. And Fitzgerald says that their message of continuing on, of “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (154), of soldiering on despite the odds against them, is dead. And they are watching the dream they sacrificed so much for, even died to protect, be ignored at its funeral.

    The America many people know today was just beginning to exist in the ‘First Modern Age’. Materialism, and its evils that come along with the affairs of the world, were just beginning to corrupt America. But the ‘flaming youth’ and those suffering from the effects of the Last Great War, did not care because “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!” was the attitude. Fitzgerald saw these things coming into play. And with one of his best known novels, he creates a message of despair: a funeral for America, one killed by Laziness (Wolfshiem), Carelessness (Tom, Daisy, and Jordan), and Obsession represented by Gatsby himself (for America needed the spark from its obsession with second chances, expansion, and opportunity to even form). “America is dying!” Fitzgerald shouts to his countrymen. “ ‘Crown thy good with brotherhood!’ How can God do that when there is no good left in you?” His desperate plea as America takes its time, a decade almost, to crash and burn with seemingly no hope for repair, is to wake up! The evils people were, and still are, doing for material things were destroying what made America who she was. His message still rings clear. Keep on the straight and narrow, or even this materialistic America with the few that still believe in the true dream will decay. And the Greatest Nation on Earth will fade. The way to the dream is not easy. The path is hard that leads to life. But the last stronghold for opportunity, expansion, and second chances is dying. So stop living with obsession over the material, and start living again. Or the American dream dies.