“Narcissistic and Depressed” (or, one of the great many letters I wish I had the guts to send to my Religion professor.)

Dear Professor —— :

I have a lot of suggestions for how this course could be improved, in order to be more sensitive to the diversity among the members of the class, but right now I want to talk about when I first realized this class was not the right place for me. It happened roughly thirty minutes into the first class session, which was the amount of time before you began pontificating about how and why my generation are all ‘narcissistic and depressed’.

“I’ll tell you why we’re all depressed,” I thought immediately. “It’s because the world is dying and we can’t fix it because we’re all slaves under late-stage capitalism.”

"Sweet and proper"

English Poet Wilfred Owen
Source: Wikipedia

As young men went off to fight in World War I, they carried with them in their minds and hearts that it was “sweet and proper” for them to die for their country.  Their ideas stemmed from widely accepted beliefs of the time period where war was not only embraced but glorified as well. Heinrich von Treitschke was a German historian in the late 1800s who taught that “war brings progress and becoming.”  Because of these commonly held beliefs, idealism and optimism spread in the minds of the soldiers at the beginning of the war. 

Unfortunately, this idealism and optimism didn’t endure the war, and for most soldiers, was lost early on in the trenches. The shift in attitude is evidenced in the literature and poetry that we have today that dates back to the Great War.  Much of what the soldiers recorded is dark and cold as they write of death, pain, and horror.  

Today I had the opportunity to listen to many poems written during WWI, and I’ll be honest with you, it was hard to keep my composure hearing about the lives of the soldiers. There was one poem in particular that struck a chord with me by an English poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen, entitled ‘Disabled.’  I felt that it related to my life, even though it was written one hundred years ago, and even though it was written from the perspective of a soldier.  Owen writes about a subject that I, along with most people in the world face daily: fear.

One parallel specifically regarding fear is that the soldiers had no idea where the next bomb was going explode, so they had to constantly be on guard.  Do we see this today?  In movie theaters, line dancing bars, night clubs, classrooms, and concerts?  

Another commonality is that with real fear, there is no off button.  Fear is a force that lingers, we learn from his poem, though it would be nice if it didn’t overstay its welcome.  

What we can conclude is that whether on the front lines at war, or the battlefields at home, we will face fear.  But like any good soldier, we can brave our fearful challenges as they come.