Procrastination.

It's 3 in the morning and I am still working on my paper for Lit. I knew I should have started it before tonight, but... I didn't. And no one's surprised. Ms. Bradshaw herself probably knew that I was going to have to pull an all-nighter tonight, and is now laughing sadistically into her pillow, thinking about how much this paper is torturing me.

Actually, I doubt that. She's a nice lady. But I should probably get back to my paper, which is a little more important than blogging. Here's my intro to it, though. I like it.

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To the naked eye, it appears that human kind lives on one planet. To the naked eye, it appears that every human being walks down the same streets, sees the same buildings and lives under the same sky as everyone else. But what the naked eye doesn’t see is that within one planet, there are countless other realms. These worlds are created by every individual as they go through life and are based off of the truths they learn as a child. Everyone’s world is different in some way, and although sometimes a world is one’s own creation, these worlds are often dictated upon individuals based upon their socioeconomic standing, gender, or race. Either way, human beings grow up in them and live within them, playing by their rules and boundaries. These individual worlds are comfort zones; they are homes.

With so many realms existing within the same place, it is only natural that they sometimes collide. When one human being meets another, both of their worlds unfurl, making visible the secrets that each world holds. These occurrences happen continuously, opening up the eyes of individuals to cultures and ways of life that they were blind to before. Sometimes, these worlds blend into one another, creating a conglomeration of views and understanding; but other times, they can crash against each other, shattering into pieces of hatred, contempt, and an inability to understand the other’s way of life.

Either way, these collisions are a basis of integration and education within our society, and they force human beings to looks outside of the world that they have grown up to know. If these calamities never occurred, societies would constantly be isolated from each other and individuals would grow up in a world that they did not create for themselves, but that they inherited from their culture and from their Diaspora of ancestors. The fear of the vulnerability that these collisions cause for human beings can prevent certain individuals from opening up, and hatred for certain cultures often gives people an excuse to not even attempt to try and reach out to others, but in order to reach self-actualization, these collisions are necessary. In order to truly know oneself, an individual must experience all types of life and decide which one suits him best. In order to truly make one’s own decisions, every human being must step outside of himself and everything he has known so that he may actually experience life.

In David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, Hatsue Imada is stuck between two worlds: her Japanese roots and her American upbringing; Guterson follows her struggle to choose between the two as a representation of the hardships of growing up as a second generation child of immigrants, especially in the politically charged era of the mid 1900’s. By showing Hatsue’s struggle to choose between her relationship with Ishmael Chambers or her family, Guterson, with uncanny accuracy, depicts the conflicts most second generation children face when trying to decide where they belong: in the land of their parents, or in a land all their own.