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Dec. 23rd, 2003 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
One thing I'd like people not to get wrong is that I did not do it out of open defiance towards her, even if it seems that way because she found me at it. It was meant as an act of self-preservation, nothing more, and that it gave me more than I had asked of it entirely incidental. If it were defiance I would not feel as guilty as I do now, rather would be happy that I got the point across to her. But I did not...there was no point I intended to make.
Think about it...wouldn't that have been an awfully cowardly way to make a point -- by not being there as a demonstration of my dislike -- ? Cowardly because I'm too afraid to confront her with it, to her face, before the whole class? Cowardly because absence is silence, not in words? (Even if "actions speak louder than words" we can only guess at the intentions of actions.) Of course, what I did was not how I wanted to make my point (yes I do have a point, but that's not why I did what I did) -- I was planning on something a little more widespread, mostly just getting moral support to get through the class, from sympathetic classmates, and that is why we entertain the fantasies of our imaginations. Verbally, anyway.
I am not guilty of a major act of resistance -- if fictionalizing about her fate could be called minor (non-physical) resistance -- only guilty of skipping class, and even that was only for the sake of my sanity.
I turn to her and speak: it was not to disrespect or criticize your choice of learning resources, but as I said it was a decision based on my moral grounds -- that is, the ground of preserving my morals. No harm was intended to either you or me, yet it did, but that is also the price of misunderstanding. We may think of, if I ask what morals kids might consider important in school time, mostly duty-related things like the duty to go to class, do homework, grow up to be a responsible citizen, etc, but in the end, morals based about mortality and life are ultimately more importanct than those in the long run. Duty to perform those things is really a sign of the lost and misplaced focus of our society -- on being responsible for yourself so you can be self-sufficient. But that's not the only thing in life, isn't it? It's not the police's responsibility to protect us from harm, to ourselves or to others, it's our own. We each have the responsibility to protect ourselves from ourselves, and material duties and their associated minor morals sometimes need to make way for that. Honestly I think it's a lot better to feel guilty over skipping a class than it is to feel guilty over killing someone -- which, who knows? -- might happen in the future if I had let myself be assaulted by that glorified war imagery.
If you aren't clear of the claim of intent I make I ask you to question any of the high-achieving students in the class. You can press them to tell you otherwise but they won't because they know what I said here is the truth, not because they're trying to cover my back. They're the best students, why would they lie to you?
"If you want to get out quickly, you could always just do something bad like Paul and get kicked out."
-Mo, prophet-after-the-fact, sometime in October
Think about it...wouldn't that have been an awfully cowardly way to make a point -- by not being there as a demonstration of my dislike -- ? Cowardly because I'm too afraid to confront her with it, to her face, before the whole class? Cowardly because absence is silence, not in words? (Even if "actions speak louder than words" we can only guess at the intentions of actions.) Of course, what I did was not how I wanted to make my point (yes I do have a point, but that's not why I did what I did) -- I was planning on something a little more widespread, mostly just getting moral support to get through the class, from sympathetic classmates, and that is why we entertain the fantasies of our imaginations. Verbally, anyway.
I am not guilty of a major act of resistance -- if fictionalizing about her fate could be called minor (non-physical) resistance -- only guilty of skipping class, and even that was only for the sake of my sanity.
I turn to her and speak: it was not to disrespect or criticize your choice of learning resources, but as I said it was a decision based on my moral grounds -- that is, the ground of preserving my morals. No harm was intended to either you or me, yet it did, but that is also the price of misunderstanding. We may think of, if I ask what morals kids might consider important in school time, mostly duty-related things like the duty to go to class, do homework, grow up to be a responsible citizen, etc, but in the end, morals based about mortality and life are ultimately more importanct than those in the long run. Duty to perform those things is really a sign of the lost and misplaced focus of our society -- on being responsible for yourself so you can be self-sufficient. But that's not the only thing in life, isn't it? It's not the police's responsibility to protect us from harm, to ourselves or to others, it's our own. We each have the responsibility to protect ourselves from ourselves, and material duties and their associated minor morals sometimes need to make way for that. Honestly I think it's a lot better to feel guilty over skipping a class than it is to feel guilty over killing someone -- which, who knows? -- might happen in the future if I had let myself be assaulted by that glorified war imagery.
If you aren't clear of the claim of intent I make I ask you to question any of the high-achieving students in the class. You can press them to tell you otherwise but they won't because they know what I said here is the truth, not because they're trying to cover my back. They're the best students, why would they lie to you?
"If you want to get out quickly, you could always just do something bad like Paul and get kicked out."
-Mo, prophet-after-the-fact, sometime in October
