My place in this world

As I started thinking a little after this last post and actually some ideas from class game this idea about a song I could put on here.
The song is called "My Place in this world" By: Michael W. Smith
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT5qZ8-2Boc&feature=related
The above link goes to the music video on youtube that would play it for you with lyrics. The lyrics are

The wind is moving, but I am standing still.
A life of pages, waiting to be filled.
A heart that's hopeful, a head that's full of dreams.
But this becoming is harder than it seems.
Feels like I'm.....
(Chorus)
Looking for a reason,
Roaming through the night to find,
My place in this world,
My place in this world.
Not a lot to lean on,
I need your light to help me find
My place in this world,
My place in this world.

If there are millions, down on their knees,
Among the many, can you still hear me?
Hear me asking, "Where do I belong?"
Is there a vision that I can call my own?
Show me I'm...

(Chorus 3X)

This song stuck out to me cause it is asking where do I belong? There was a little of that confusion in several places in the book. I believe that this shows when the girlfriend of Absalom is first introduced, and I believe that is maybe one reason that a lot of the young folk left Ndotsheni as well. They want to find something that is maybe more than themselves, would be the way to put it.  I believe that is found though. The girlfriend finds it in the family with Stephen Kumalo. The sad part is that some lose hope and don't find that home because they stopped trying. I believe that is one reason why Gertrude left that morning. She had given up, and that is why she was leading the life that she was leading when Stephen Kumalo came along.This was just one thing that I thought up.
One more thing that can relate was my favorite quote in the book was, "The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again." -Msimangu
It is so true and I honestly strongly agree with it. Things are broken all the time. The problem comes when those broken things are not mended. South Africa was broken through apartheid and through some of its ideals that it had at the time. Those things were not being mended either and South Africa just seemed to break further and further apart. The nation was divided and as Abraham Lincoln once said, "A house divided cannot stand."  Thus was the situation in South Africa. That's where the unifying power of love came in and was able to pull the nation back together.

The Unifying Power of Love and What it Helped South Africa Become.

Well I have covered every other aspect that we were supposed to focus on, but the unifying power of love. This was a little challenging for me, but actually as I started to reread several passages I started to realize that, for me at least, you have to read a lot of in between the lines for some of the ways it comes in and the effects that it has and that you can see. There were some obvious passages where love was shown. When Absalom's girlfriend was part of the family her love for the priest and his family was automatically there. She wanted that family and the priest loved her and the baby she bore as the family they were. When Absalom and the girlfriend were married the priest saw nothing, but family. That is what I took from that. They were instantly united as a family and they went through hardships, such as Absalom's sentence, as a family and loved each other like a family.

This book is filled with so many things such as melancholy, injustice, unfairness, remorse, hate, and unbelief, but you can also see if you look a little further maybe you can see some hope that things will look better and you can see some love. Though some of these people have suffered more than I can imagine and their is fear almost everywhere you turn love is the thing that held everyone together.
In the last chapter of the book it says, "...God save Africa. But he would not see that salvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him, and his wife, and Msimangu, and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger?....Yet men were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love."
It said "God save Africa", but Africa would not be saved from the fear of it. The old ways were fine cause they would be at least used to it, so they didn't want to change and be saved basically. The effect of fear like I said in the recent post will hinder progress as it said in this passage. The ways that South Africa tried to keep up because they were afraid of everything else was the apartheid. The injustice that they showed through the apartheid.

The book seemed pretty bleak with no unifying power honestly in my opinion. It wasn't until the very last paragraph honestly that I found their might be a little more then the fear, inequality and the little land comments. It says, "...The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret." In my opinion this is a statement of hope for all of those people back then. The situation personally seemed pretty bleak and hopeless with not a lot that couuld be done about it. This is where I believe that the whole unifying power of love came in though. They loved the land and realized its importance. They pushed through the hard times after they figured out what was wrong. They overcame some fears and started to bring about some equality for those that deserved it. All of the 4 topics of focus I believe came into play under the unifying power of love because they all had some role to bring it about.  The fear and inequality kinda brought the need while the importance of the land brought a common interest to build off of.
As it turns out South Africa did end up pushing through it. Look at South Africa today.

The Effect of Fear

Personally I believe the effect of fear is underlying throughout the whole entire novel of Cry the Beloved Country, and it made itself known at least once every reading if not every chapter. I believe that it is shown through the effects of the apartheid. The whole movement of the apartheid was because the white man felt threatened by the black people thus by force and because of higher education they changed it so that the black people stayed below the white people.

The white people would come up with the stereotypes for the "natives" as they called them bringing their crime and their faults to the forefront to have people believe through fear that they were naturally bad or that the whites were above them. The whole apartheid movement was run by the effect of fear. Fear never gets us anywhere. If we fear, sure we may stay safer, our progress slows down as well and we get less and less done. Fear was the main obstacle in keeping the country basically separated and leading up to trouble that could have very easily been avoided then and even now.
Fear keeps us from solving problems. Life is about learning, you can't learn anything if you don't take some sort of risk. It's like practically any experience. You can't get the full experience of a book and its full meaning to you if you never open it. Sure you can look on Sparknotes or have somebody tell you what happened, but you didn't learn as much as you could have or get some of those lessons that, who knows, you could possibly use later in life. You learned maybe a little, but like in other discoveries, it would take so much more time to get where you want to be on those bits and pieces of information and having fear rule what you would do than to take a risk and learn the results.

The Importance of the Land.

Throughout Cry the Beloved Country, land was brought up in several different points. At the very beginning of the book it talks about rolling green hills with mist, trees and a thick carpet of grass. A river that ran down the mountain and the plush landscape.

As you went down the mountain, however, the land changed. The green grass started to disappear replaced by dirt and rocks on a trail you have to be careful on for its steepness. The river had stopped and no green plush foliage grew in the valley where the corn there barely grew to the height of a man.

Near the end of a book a man who specialized in agriculture came to the land of Ndotsheni and showed these people how to farm in a way that it would be possible for their to be more food and for the ground to be able to receive nutrients again.  The importance of the land is undescribably essential to our survival. If we destroy the land we don't have anything else. We can't survive in a destroyed land. It is that simple. Try to keep our land alive and treat it as if it is our lifesource because it is.

The Citations.

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-7369891/stock-photo--hills-south-africa.html
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/52833159/Hulton-Archive
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/HL7952-001/Hulton-Archive
http://www.artprintsa.com/karin-daymond-landscapes.html
http://southafrica-for-dummies.com/apartheid-in-south-africa/
http://artisanartgallery.co.uk/artisanartgalleryartists.aspx
http://www.uen.org/utahlink/activities/view_activity.cgi?activity_id=21372
http://www.bugbog.com/gallery/south_africa_pictures/south_africa_pictures.html
http://www.destination360.com/africa/south-africa
http://www.blacktomatoevents.com/1649/international-incentive-programme/
http://www.southafrica.to/transport/carrentals/news/2008/20080906-Cape-Town.php5
http://www.ncgs.org/news/ncgsco-executivedirectortourssouthafricaschools_163/~thenationalcoalitionofgirlsschools_30
http://myloupe.com/home/detail-rf.php?image_id=218982&referring_seller=290

The Cycle of Injustice.

I believe my favorite section of this whole book honestly was from the article of "Native Crime" written by Arthur Jarvis, and read by James Jarvis after his son's death. This hit the Cycle of Injustice write on the nose in my opinion. His eloquence and interpretation of various events and circumstances around him brought to the writing of a fantastic article in my opinion.

Arthur Jarvis said, "It was permissible to develop our great resources with the aid of what labour we could find. It was permissible to use unskilled men unskilled for the sake of unskilled work."  In this quote he justifies what once done. The people found wealth and the unskilled who needed jobs worked. It was permissible then.

Arthur Jarvis continued however saying, "But it is no longer permissible in the light of what we know. Partly because it made possible industrial development, and partly because it happened in spite of us, there is now a large urbanized native population. Now the society has always, for reasons of self-interest if for no other, educated its children so that they grow up law-abiding, with socialized aims and purposes. there is no other way that it can be done. yet we continue to leave the education of our native urban society to those few Europeans who feel strongly about it, and to deny opportunities and money for its expansion. That is not permissible. For reasons of self-interest alone, it is dangerous.....it is not permissible to watch its destruction, and to replace it by nothing, or by so little, that a whole people deteriorates, physically and morally." Jarvis explains people can't live this way. It was permissible to use people with poor education to build the mines as well as start to build a society. They now have a society and more education, but for the Europeans, and for the white man's self-interest they kept the blacks out of education and denied them the opportunities to make better of themselves. This led to crimes of the black people because they can no longer trust the white man as they watch them deteriorate as a race by their own fault. With the poor conditions of the blacks came the native crime that was so infamous in the book. People were in a way forced to become prostitutes, brewers, and others of the sorts just to be able to provide a living for themselves.  

The Cycle of Injustice is showed quite obviously here as it shows the basis of the white man blaming the black man for something that the white created. One article that I found interesting was about a group of people in a community who had come up with "Mob Justice" which took the roles of the courts to the people's own terms. Sounds good right? Wrong. It showed people being punished for things that they didn't even do or the wrong was far lighter than the punishment was. The reason was partly from the distrust of the courts that was brought from the apartheid movement showing how the injustice back then brought fear and distrust to the present.

This is really new to me.

So I'm asking you to bear with me with this blog. :) I've never done anything like this before so I'm hoping I can pull this off. Anyway as an English 11 Honors class we read the book Cry the Beloved Country which I thought was a fantastic book. It was a little slow at times I'll admit, but it has been a book that I was glad to be able to think about as I read it. As we posted to the wiki we had to have some sort of source from the outside so the source for me was http://www.timeslive.co.za/?gclid=CKepuZGesaUCFRxqgwodxBBLYg which is a type of online newspaper/news site. It is comparable to our MSN or Yahoo with the same type of advertisments and stories that would go all around that country. Well this is my first post and thank you for reading. :)