The hidden benefits of Amnesty

A few weeks ago I wrote a series of angry letters to all of the people/companies that i felt were acting without integrity towards me. I wrote one to Ian Chubb, the vice-chancellor of ANU complaining about the current downsizing of the undergraduate schools of Arts and Social Sciences. I should write more about this subject but others do it better, basically the schools are being amalgamated, teachers are being dismissed in favour of hiring more researchers, less classes are being offered and resources in general are getting reallocated to postgraduate departments, and all without consultation with undergraduate arts and social sciences students. The second letter i wrote was to Woroni, the ANU student newspaper, who drafted a story on the 'Save the Humanities Campaign' but pulled it at the last minute out of fear (im guessing) of Chancellery, my letter questioned why they werent covering the story seeing that the Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC Radio were, and what allegience they had with Chancellery that could keep them from publishing a story that is so obviously relevant to the ANU student body. The final letter i wrote was to the exchange company that arranged for my family to host a dutch exchange student for a total of five months and then never bothered to find her a family for her remaining seven months, thus leaving her with nowhere to stay but with us.

I'm learning now just how successful writing letters can be. While my letter to Chubb was part of a bigger letter writing campaign and hasnt been delivered yet, my letter to Woroni was published in the most recent edition with a note saying that coverage of the campaign would be included in the next issue. I also received a prompt response from the editors when they got my letter promising coverage of the campaign. The exchange company also responded quickly and a week after sending the letter, my family got a call from the company telling them they had found Dutchy a new family, every member of my family had been calling the exchange company to complain for months.

What astonished me more though was how much i enjoyed writing the letters. I loved it! Sitting on my high horse casting disapproving glances and the corrupt, lowly charlatans below me. What is more, it came ridiculously easy. I sit staring at nothing for hours when im writing essays, trying to find the right word or phrase that will translate the messy sentiment in my head into something legible. but when i was writing letters, phrases like 'i demand' and 'i condemn' were popping up left, right and centre.

It led me to thinking about how i got so good at criticising people in written form. I could take it, and do, as part of my current mission to be more assertive, it is easier to assert myself in writing than in person. But i also think i could thank Amnesty International for my new found skills. I started campaigning for Amnesty when i was in year 11, copying letters from their website and rewording them or taking pointers and writing them myself. Six years of practice now and i think i can thank Amnesty not only for my letter writing skills but also for the idea of advocacy, Amnesty writes letters advocating for others who cant do so for themselves, on the general idea that wrongdoings should be stood up against. Perhaps Amnesty can take a role in my mission of self assertion; in learning how to advocate for others i have learnt how to advocate for myself.

On another note, can one advocate for oneself? Or does advocate mean representing the interests of someone else? I shall look up.

On another different note, here is JK Rowling discussing some other hidden benefits of Amnesty (among other things). Its long, but shes good

Hey blog,

Im feeling a little tired and blue today. A slight hangover, a lack of sleep, guilt from unfinished readings and weather that cant decide if its cold or hot has left me feeling flat and dreading the prospect of a midnight finish at work tonight. So, here is some stuff that made me smile this week

- The kid sitting behind me on the bus who borrowed his mum's phone in order to call spiderman. Spiderman was on another bus, on his way to the zoo!

- Posters from the 'Save the Humanities campaign at ANU



- the man smoking a pipe outside the street theatre

- this Jonathan Boulet video clip



- The sexiness of Robert Plant









- and Sexy rats

Video clips made in one shot

and i suppose the obvious choice

So i'm planning to go overseas this year. Its still very much in the 'how cool would it be if i went here?' stage but some of the plans so far were

- visit Cathy in Hong Kong and venture into Tibet with her
- use mum's connections to get myself a job in an Irish pub
- plays on both West End and Broadway
- some sort of affordable transatlantic ocean travel
- new years in New York
- listen to Sigur Ros in Iceland
- visit the graveyard in Montmartre
- pretend to be in a Gus Van Sant movie in Portland

and this festival in Germany. I have a friend who lives about forty minutes away and goes every year. He even introduced me to Shout Out Louds, who are on the line-up, who we saw together in Sydney. It would be perfect. But its on the 18th of June, same day that my exam period ends.

Epic wah.

-

Dear you (or me, probably mostly me),

i am writing this for you. because sometimes i encounter things that i like, be they books, songs, movies, pictures and, well i think Alain de Botton put it best

"While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may not be so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.

Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginitive way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."

So maybe you can't buy objects of art but its the longing that de Botton talks about that gets me, i want to interact with these things that seemingly interact with me. So i will respond bluntly and put them on the internet.

But i defend myself, the internet; social networking, blogs etc, could be seen to be a virtual platform for self creation, i thus intend to create myself from a composite of pieces of art that embody inner qualities that i desire.

I had a blog like that, its on tumblr, infact, its here. but im moving because i also like to write, sometimes about this stuff, sometimes about my day, sometimes about nothing whatever. but i was once a good writer, or perhaps a self-deceiving but confident writer and i have since lost that confidence. but i figure writing is one of those things that improves with practice, so here i go.

That being said, im a little bit nervous. ive read some great blogs, but also some awful ones. i dont want to be the writer of an awful blog, i feel already as if this wank has been a vigourous one. sorry. or not. i dont know. here is some stuff that i like:




Franz Ferdinand's addition to the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack. I like the song better than i liked the film, its truer to Lewis Carroll's novels

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions. To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn face of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies beneath their outward silence, is to discern struggle on a Homeric scale, conflicts of dragons and hydras, aerial hosts as in Milton, towering vistas as in Dante. The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movements of his spirit with the acts of his life, is an overpowering thing."

A passage from my current favourite novel, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo