Thoughts about this course

Over this semester I have learned how to be compassionate toward other people. I have also learned that in many of the cases that we saw this semester, human suffering is only a temporary moment in the lives of many and that the hardships that someone goes through does not define their entire life. Another lesson that I am taking away from this course is to honor other people’s faiths even if they are founded on beliefs that I do not participate in.

The readings I enjoyed the most of this semester were “Maus” and “First They Killed My Father.” I saw a lot of myself in the character Art when I was reading Maus. I have often had a difficult time bonding with my parents and I understood the same frustrations that Art was going through. It can be tough to deal with people when they have inherited characteristics that they cannot avoid. For instance, Vladek was always trying to conserve what little food or resources he had and this reflected into his later years as a freed man living in modern society. He cannot help the way he is since that was what he needed to do to survive. In some ways, I feel the same emotions about my own family. I think their relationship was flawed due to their lack of understanding of each other’s circumstances and I believe that the same feelings can be applied to the way the younger generation acts towards their elders. These days, we have the technological resources to complete many simple tasks that would have been difficult in the past. In the generations to come, I think that there will be a wide technological gap between those who know how to operate computers and those who do not.

“First They Killed My Father” was an interesting read to begin this semester because it was told through the perspective of a child. It is difficult to process how an adult would react in these situations to much less a child. I appreciated this book as an introduction of what we would be talking about this semester because it gave me an idea on the sort of topics we would be covering and spread awareness on a genocide that I had not heard about.