Sam Hammil Response

Sam Hammil Response

Hammil had several ideas he presented in which I found to be interesting. But the most interesting idea I found of Hammil’s was how accurate he was on describing how people want to live a sheltered life and they really don’t want to see or know the truths and hardships of the world. Hammil presents this idea by stating “We go on living our sheltered lives among the potted plants and automobiles and advertising slogans. We don’t want to know what the world is like, we can’t hear very much reality”. People are blind and want to stay blind from the hardships of the world, everyone wants the perfect life and never stops to think about what’s really going on.

Hammil did a good job on presenting the fact that the only people who truly appreciate life and what they have are the ones who have seen and experienced the negative side of life, those are the ones who will remember. Hammil did this by stating “The convict, the ex-con, the rape victim, the battered child—each, reading these words, will remember”. As you read Hammil’s words you can feel the emotion he puts into his writing and how his personal life experiences make this capable. Hammil tries to make us understand why we express our emotion in certain environments by stating, “We can’t bear very much reality. When a rape victim cries out for help, we are frozen. Our emotions are mute. We are seized as though we cannot catatonic. We have not been taught how to properly express our feelings. We find poetry embarrassing.”

I agree with Hammil and his ideas about how and why people respond to negative situations in certain ways. People from a young age are not taught to deal with stress or even how to deal with their emotions if something should happen to them which had a negative impact on them. When I was a kid playing sports was fun for me, but if someone was better than you at a certain position they played over you and you sat the bench until you proved to the coach your skills were better. This made kids learn how to appreciate what they had, it did this because you had to work for something you really wanted and it wasn’t just given to you.

Kids today get equal playing time no matter how hard they work. To me this makes them not only as kids but as they become adults more un-appreciative of what they have, people expect to be taken care of with working hard for what they have. “Dealing with our feelings is facing, accepting and working through them. We will always have emotions, so we have to learn to deal with them.” (http://www.edu.pe.ca/southernkings/emotionsdeal.htm). I was taught that everyone’s talent levels differ from one person to the next, but everyone is capable of working hard just as hard as the next. If people are taught from a young age how to deal with their emotions no matter if they are impacted in a positive way or negative, we as humans could make a better world and not be so shy or blind about reality.