One belief I hold strongly and have held for as long as I can remember, is that I was born into a privileged society and should be aware of those who were not. This belief has developed through the years, beginning as a simple fact that I accepted and arriving at my current passion and involvement in politics and social organizations. Rhetoric has almost certainly played a role in my adoption of this belief, and has also been used by me in propelling this belief further.
This belief began when I was very little when my mother would read to my sister and I at night. Both my parents are very socially aware and, wishing to open my sister and my minds to as many different realities as possible, had a huge bookshelf of children’s stories and picture books from all over the world. While the stories contained the same types of things children are interested in, they often covered more mature concepts such as hunger, racism, patriarchal vs matriarchal societies, inequality, and struggling for survival.
I have also attended a Quaker Meeting for Worship for my entire life. The members of this faith group are very social justice and peace oriented; the songs we sung during worship and stories we read during “children’s meeting” deeply reflected that.
The grade school I attended was a conservative Christian Reformed school with a limited world view. During the first few years, I thought nothing of the fact that everything we learned in class expanded no further than the borders of Ontario, with the exception of our Biblical studies on the Middle East, during which we learned that the nation of Israel “rightly belonged” to the Jews (a view I quickly demolished upon entering politics). As I entered Grade 7 and became more rebellious, I began thinking of ways to “be difficult” and stir up a fuss. As it happened, I simply had to acknowledge the beliefs I’d had since childhood and apply them to school. Suddenly I was scolding every poor kid in sight for their “ignorance," arguing with my teachers for only teaching their own Christian worlds, and spreading the wise words of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam all over the school (the latter of which was a poor idea, since it was a fairly right-wing Christian school). While these were years of admirable passion for social justice and raising awareness, they were not exactly well thought out or considerate of the people around me. I’m fairly certain they heaved a sigh of relief when I graduated.
I attended a Catholic high school that was very globally aware, offering many different action groups and sponsoring a variety of speakers. It was during my high school experience that I went through two important experiences with regards to this belief: I developed a strong sense of guilt from the knowledge that I was born into a privileged society without having done anything to deserve it, and then I also decided that the only solution to that guilt was, and is, to dedicate my life working for justice in areas less privileged than that which I was born into.
Finally, I lived in Thailand for eleven months with a native Thai family. While the family I lived with was clearly wealthy, being financially stable enough to sponsor an exchange student, simply travelling out the back door of their house allowed me to see firsthand the extreme differences between “the rich” and “the poor”. This experience changed all of my beliefs and social justice passions, that had formerly been just beliefs, into a reality that I saw right in from of me.
Rhetoric absolutely played a role in the initiation of this belief. While my parents never directly told me that we were wealthy compared to most of the world, or that I should become globally aware and passionate about the struggle for equality, the stories they chose to cover our bookshelves with were clearly intended to open our minds to other realities and the issue of inequality. The members of my Quaker group, being people I hold much respect for, also inevitably hoped to sway me into the path of justice and peace, which they eventually did. I don’t believe they did this in a manipulative way, but merely by voicing their own beliefs and perspectives, which coincided with mine.
The faculty at my high school also likely chose speakers with the intentions of inspiring the students to take action. The speakers used emotion and dramatic stories from their lives to inspire us to join their cause for social justice and equality. While I did not always join their cause directly, the knowledge that they and many others with similar stories exist was enough to help sway me in the direction I chose to lead my life.
While it is certainly true that I naturally have a strong passion for justice (being the middle child, there were quite a few instances where I fought for it, despite my so-called Quaker pacifism), many of the influential people in my life have the same passion and would be pleased to see me lead my life in that direction.
