In our modern world, people seek to rid themselves of all anger, yet, they haven’t realized that anger can’t be disposed of. Similar to the broad spectrum of human emotions, anger is part of our human experience. However, through reflecting on this human emotion, we can gain perspective on how anger has a role in shifting our consciousness. Couldn’t we shift our outlook on anger as an experience that we have some level of control over, much like a flame that depends on the fuel it is fed? Ben Mikaelsen’s book, Touching Spirit Bear, follows 15-year-old Cole Matthews’s journey, as he learns to gain the upper hand over his anger. After viciously smashing Peter Driscal’s skull into a sidewalk, Cole is given the choice to serve a year of restorative justice on a remote Alaskan island. When Cole arrives on the island, he immediately burns down his shelter in an act of anger and soon after, he is mauled to “an inch of life” by the mysterious Spirit Bear. Although he is immobilized, Cole is determined to survive. In his emotionally vulnerable state, Cole demonstrates care for other creatures, and he begins to reform with the help of Garvey, his Minneapolis parole officer, and Edwin, a Tlingit Indian elder. Even though Cole has gained the upper hand over his anger, he is unable to truly reform until he has made amends with Peter, who attempted to commit suicide. When Cole invites Peter to the island, he mentors him, teaching him about healing and strategies to control his anger, and Peter eventually reforms too. Two valuable takeaways from Touching Spirit Bear are that anger is one of many human emotions and by itself doesn’t define us, and that second, anger can be rechanneled and repurposed to produce a positive outcome. Anger is just one emotion in the mixed bag of human feelings, and it would be unreasonable to label someone as angry simply because they are experiencing that emotion. We are more than our emotions. Society struggles to see beyond these exhibited emotions; it takes seeing through them to get a true glimpse of someone. For example, when a parent calls out their child as “selfish” or “rude” for how they behave, the child is being superficially labeled for what they did in the moment. In Touching Spirit Bear, Cole Matthews is driven by rage when he viciously attacks his classmate Peter Driscal, burns down his cabin on the island he was banished to, and attacks the Spirit Bear. While Cole’s attack on Peter may be seen as an act of anger, if we look deeper, Cole’s true motive was to make him care in ways that Cole was never cared for. Growing up as a neglected child, Cole was never cared for and even as a teenager, he still feels that others don’t care about his feelings. As a result, Cole turns to anger and violence because that was what he was taught. His very own father beat him to make him care and respect his word. Similarly, although Cole’s act of burning down his shelter was done out of anger, we must understand his past and the context in which he was raised. In the same way, when Cole attacks the Spirit Bear, he is angry that the bear doesn’t fear him, but on a deeper level, wanted to make him care about his presence. Eventually, Cole arrives at the conclusion that he is not defined by his anger and says, “I just realized that I’m not a bad person. Nobody is… People are just scared and do bad things. Sometimes people hurt each other trying to figure things out” (168). When Cole comes to this self-realization, he looks beyond the surface of his emotions, realizing he is processing his neglected and abusive upbringing. It was in this self-realization that Cole was able to forgive himself and move beyond labeling himself as angry. There is so much more than what meets the eye when it comes to our emotions, which are so often fueled by one’s past experiences, unprocessed grief and trauma. Therefore, it is too simplistic to label someone as the emotion they exhibit. On a subconscious level, anger can be one’s greatest teacher as it offers insight which can lead to change. Through reliving anger and experiencing the consequences of acting out in anger, one may process what led them to anger. When Cole attacks the Spirit Bear in an outburst of rage, the animal mauls him to a state of near-death. It is through reliving the mauling several times in his mind that he can process his anger and the motive behind his attack. Cole’s pride is tested when the bear isn’t afraid of him. Realizing his own pride and desire to be seen, Cole is able to understand his abusive father on a deeper level. He learns that his father was abused as a child and held on to his unprocessed grief and anger, which carried over into his relationship with his son. With this perspective, Cole is able to forgive his father’s countless acts of neglect, assault and abuse. With the help of Edwin, a Tlingit Indian elder, and Garvey, his Minneapolis parole officer, Cole sets out on a healing journey and a path of reform. Cole soaks in a frigid pond and rolls away the “ancestor rock” to let off steam, yet the most significant step to his reform is showing compassion to his victim. In the aftermath of Cole’s attack, Peter attempts to commit suicide twice. Feeling compassion, Cole invites Peter to the island. He hopes to gain back Peter’s trust and make amends for assaulting him. Cole is profoundly aware of his change of heart and tells Peter, “‘I’m part of some big circle that I don’t understand. And so are you. Life, death, good and bad, everything is part of that circle. When I hurt you, I hurt myself, too. I don’t think I’ll ever heal from what I did
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The Satanic Pact that Kickstarted World War II
How close was the world to being a Fascist-Leninist dystopia if a joint alliance of Hitler, Stalin, and Hideki Tōjō had won World War II? This could have been a consequence if it weren’t for a series of blunders made by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, including one by Adolf Hitler, when he turned one of his most powerful allies into one of his most fateful enemies. That ally turned enemy was Joseph Stalin. But wasn’t Stalin’s Russia one of the Allied powers fighting against the tyrannical Fascists? How was Stalin an ally of Adolf Hitler? First, Stalin had no noble intentions of destroying tyranny when he joined the fight against the Fascists. He was dragged into the war by Hitler’s betrayal (Turner). Furthermore, Stalin was a notorious tyrant himself, not that different from Adolf Hitler, or Benito Mussolini, or Hideki Tōjō (Moorhouse). Despite being perpetually paranoid and famously “trusting nobody,” Stalin trusted and admired Hitler (Lukacs). Even though Fascists and Marxists are sworn enemies ideologically, and the Soviet Union is remembered for defeating Nazi Germany, their often overlooked diabolical union in the early days of World War II might have caused one of the most debilitating wars in history. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact formed by emissaries of Hitler and Stalin aided Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Eastern Europe, thereby directly causing World War II. The Fascists and Marxist-Leninists never got along. Nazi propaganda condemned the Soviet Union, and vice versa. However, after months of negotiation with Britain and France to form an alliance with them against Germany, Russia eventually relented in trying to ally with them and turned instead to an alliance with Germany. Stalin understood Britain was not eager to enter an alliance with Russia because of their distrust of the Communists (Lukacs). Britain and France agreed to defend Poland if it were ever invaded, but they had done nothing when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia despite its violation of the Munich agreement, making Stalin doubt their resolve (Klein). The Soviet Union was already engaged in a war with Japan on its eastern front and considered peace with Germany to be an attractive option (Klein). Interestingly, Imperial Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Hitler was scrambling for an alliance with Stalin before he invaded Poland so that he would not have a two-front war like Germany did in World War I (Klein). He arranged for German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to meet with Soviet counterpart Molotov. Stalin did voice his skepticism when he said, “For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of sh*t on each other’s heads, and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. And now, suddenly, are we to make our people believe that all is forgotten and forgiven? Things don’t work that fast” (Evans). Still, within just a few hours, an ominous pact was formed between Fascist Germany and the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union. “The sinister news broke upon the world like an explosion,” Churchill wrote (Klein). The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact directly kickstarted World War II, making the debilitating war as much Stalin’s culpability as Hitler’s. If Stalin had remained an ally of Hitler and become an Axis power, the result might have been devastating for the Allies and the entire world. Even as Western Communists left the Soviet Communist party in great numbers after the pact, and German Nazis were shocked by the alliance with the Communists they had fought for years (Moorhouse), the pact was mutually beneficial to Stalin and Hitler for nefarious reasons. The pact had secret clauses where they partitioned Poland between the two countries (Evans). They jointly invaded Poland, Germany from the west and Russia from the east, giving the world a taste of what was to come. The Soviets also invaded Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, and parts of Romania (Evans). Moorhouse also claims that, with this pact, Stalin was ready “to set the world-historical forces of revolution in motion.” The alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union even went so far that Germany provided state-of-the-art military equipment to the Soviet Union in exchange for raw materials such as oil and grain (Moorhouse). In eastern Poland, the Soviets carried out “mass arrests and deportations, shootings, torture and expropriation” (Evans). Thousands of Polish army officers were massacred in the Katyn Forest, and millions of Poles were sent to suffer in the harsh terrain and climate of remote Siberia and Central Asia (Moorhouse). Meanwhile, in Western Poland, things were even worse, where the Germans carried out “the expropriation of Polish farms and businesses, the mass confiscation and looting of private property, the deportation of more than a million young Poles to work as slaves in Germany, the brutal displacement of Polish populations, the massacres of Poles, and the confinement of the majority of Poland’s 3 million Jews in overcrowded, insanitary, and deadly ghettoes in the major cities in the Nazi zone.” (Evans). Stalin even sent German communist refugees in the Soviet Union to the Gulags, and from there, they were deported to the Nazi concentration camps (Moorhouse). What happened in occupied Poland is a horrific reminder of what could have happened to the world if Germany and Russia had stayed allies. Thankfully, Hitler and Stalin’s alliance did not last very long, and Hitler backstabbed Stalin mid-war, therefore triggering the two-front war he had feared all along. There are a few explanations as to why Hitler might have turned on one of his most powerful allies when he was winning. Many believe that Hitler turned on Stalin because he was a fanatical anti-communist with a profound hatred for Slavs (Lukacs). He was probably also disappointed by Stalin’s failed invasion of Finland. Additionally, the war was deadlocked in 1941, with neither the United Kingdom nor Nazi Germany being able to defeat each other, and USA inching closer to joining the war (Lukacs). Churchill famously inspired his troops by saying “We shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the
Smartphone Addiction: One Middle Schooler’s Perspective
When I look at my classmates’ faces, absorbed in their smartphones, they look eerily expressionless, even hollow. Their eyes look tired and droopy; their faces look drained and sulking. They look like they have no choice. It is almost as if they are compelled by some unseen force to use every second of the time limit their parents have set on their devices. I cannot help but think of them as stuck in quicksand. They are not even trying to get out of it! I think my fellow classmates, and most middle school students and teens, are addicted to smartphones. Smartphones have taken over our society. According to 2019 data, 53% of American children own a smartphone by the time they are 11 years old. 84% of teenagers own a smartphone. I have read many news reports in which researchers claim that smartphones can be fun and educational for children and teens and help them socialize with others. As a middle school student who sees the negative impacts of excessive smartphone usage in school, I strongly disagree with these claims. First, excessive smartphone usage causes students to have a distractive personality. The constant buzzing of new messages turns the student’s attention toward the phone and away from the teacher. Students tend to lose their attention easily and cannot focus on what is being taught in class. Even when their phones are not buzzing, their attention seems to be directed toward the phone. Smartphones and other devices are designed to be addictive. For example, in many video games, players are shown their own and their competitors’ scores. Children want to beat other players’ scores. Children may not know this, but their ambition to beat others in the game causes them to keep on playing the game. Sometimes children lose sleep over games, which can be very harmful to their health. Another example of how smartphones are designed to be addictive is the way the apps notify the users when their post has been liked or commented on. It makes children feel pressured to keep on posting more pictures so that people continue to like their pictures. No wonder the children in my school are hooked. Second, smartphones can really hurt children’s mental health. Children can lose self-esteem because of hurtful things on the internet. They can fall behind in their studies and suffer academically. They are so distracted that they are not able to keep up with the work in school, which affects their grades. This can cause them to be depressed. Children who are lonely in school turn to their smartphones to distract themselves or make friends online, but that does not seem to help. When children are on their phones so much, they don’t socialize with people around them. As a result, they have trouble working in teams. They are unable to ask for help when they need it. They are unable to develop healthy relationships with others. This causes them to plunge into their devices even more; the cycle goes on. Parents must take the responsibility for these consequences because they are the ones who choose to give their children smartphones. Some parents think that by setting time limits and parental controls they can control their child(ren)’s phone use. I think this just makes things worse. Students in my school use all the time they have on their smartphones until their time limit goes off. They seem to be waiting for that time in the day when they can use their smartphones; they are the first thing they reach for at lunchtime. This machine seems to immerse them. Sometimes I imagine them turning into a machine. Why do parents give their children smartphones? This question has been haunting me and I think I finally know the answer now. Parents want to have a good relationship with their children, so they give them everything they want to make them happy. Parents may also think that their child is growing up and they deserve to have a smartphone. It is possible that their child is nagging them to have a smartphone because their friends have it. Some parents want their children to be able to communicate with them or contact them. Some others may think that there are many advantages to using smartphones, including playing games, socializing, having fun, and learning. Yet others may think their children are not susceptible to these kinds of behaviors. Others might think the disadvantages are minor. I do not think any of these are good enough reasons to give your child a smartphone because of all the severely negative impacts it can have on a child. In my experience, most children my age do not know how to control their smartphone usage. I only know of one student in my class who has a smartphone but does not bring it to school. At home, she uses it to listen to music while doing homework. I suspect that she is the exception. It breaks my heart to see children not being children, and students not being students. Children are missing social and academic experiences in school. They are getting into patterns of behavior that are hurting them now and will hurt them in the future. I urge parents not to give their children smartphones at such a young age. Give children their childhood back.
