Letter to a Friend

¶ … school and all the other crap going on over here. You know something? College would be fantastic if it weren't for these pesky little things called classes…they can take all the fun out of a perfectly good day =/ Actually, I have to say that school's been pretty cool. Some of my classes are boring…of course…that's why it's called school, right? But some of my other classes are pretty interesting and some of them really make me think about things, including stuff we've talked about before.

For one example, I'm taking this Writing class where we just read Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman, a Polish writer who immigrated to Canada from Poland a few years after World War II when she was thirteen years old. Basically, her family was living in postwar Poland in a town that was still largely rubble four years after the end of the war and where her father had to scurry around scrounging for food to feed his family.

We've discussed how lucky we were that we just happened to be born into American society instead of all of the other places and circumstances we could have been born into and this reading made me think of those conversations. It really puts into perspective the history stuff we read about the Marshall Plan and the reasons that the U.S. foreign policy relied so heavily on providing economic assistance to war-torn European countries during the early Cold War years (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, & Argersinger, 2005).

The other thing that really struck me about this reading was that it also illustrated the idea we were discussing last winter about how people can become psychologically attached even to people, places, and circumstances that they perceived as completely unpleasant at the time that they were experiencing them.

I'm not sure if you remember that conversation but it started out because I got in trouble for goofing on my kid sister for crying her eyes out when she got off the bus that brought her home from summer camp whining about missing her friends and her counselors and stuff. All she did that whole summer was complain about how the food sucked and camp sucked and her counselors sucked and how she wanted to come home early and all of that.

And then, she ended up crying as soon as they stuck her on the bus at the end of the summer. That book we found in my father's study called Bradshaw: On the Family (2000) talked all about that: how people can get emotionally attached to things and to people even if their only real experiences with them were very negative.

I don't remember if we discussed it but Bradshaw (2000) used the example of convicts who actually miss prison life after they come home just because it was all they really knew and because it had become their routine. This author describes something very similar about leaving Poland.

I mean, first she explains that her father had to scrounge around like a bum just to find food or to earn a few cents a day and that even after the Holocaust, the Polish authorities were still just as anti-Semitic as they had been before the war. Then, on the same page, she goes on and on about how scared she was.