Hey guys, I'm relatively new to the forum, but I was wondering if I could get any feedback for my context piece on Encountering Conflict. My main concern is that I won't be able to write it in the time limit so any tips on shortening the length would be appreciated
The text is Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"
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Prompt: Conflict brings out the Best and Worst in people.
Extracts from ‘The New York Times’ written by Edward R. Murrow (1908 – 1965) under the pseudonym of “Cassius”
Issue No.01 - August 16th, 1953
To the People of the City of New York.
Because an article on Senator McCarthy is by definition, controversial, I shall attempt to convey exactly what I mean to say, without the threat of gratuitous persecution. An uncomfortable silence has swept throughout our streets; we know this to be true. It is an evident silence, a silence that speaks louder than any word in the English language, for it speaks to the mind and in the confines of our minds resides the greatest weapon, ideas. It stifles our individuality by forcing the regurgitation of pious platitudes and narrow prejudices, rather than our true voices that long to be heard. It is a silence that confronts us with an unethical dilemma; whether to prosecute, or risk being prosecuted. Indeed, it is an age of confusion that we live in, confusion not unlike that which had blinded God, for “until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven”, unknowing of the jealousy concealed under his countenance. Like God, we have been blinded by the government that rules over us. We trade in our own beliefs to government for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even for a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can easily be picked up cheap in the market place while such vital commodities as courage and fortitude are in alarmingly short supply.
It has been called McCarthyism, yet this is a thinly veiled euphemism for fear.
Issue No. 24 November 15th, 1953
”Upon what meat doth this, our Caesar, feed?”
This line, quoted by Senator McCarthy himself in the Zwicker case seemed most apt in order to convey the hypocrisy of American government. Indeed, I direct the question towards the junior senator himself, for upon what meat doth Senator McCarthy feed? Two of the staples of his diet are the half truth and the demagogic inculcation into the masses that communism is and always will be a threat to the supposed prosperity of America. Yet, his manipulative policies, the meat on which he feasts on, that should be seen as the work of the Devil himself, for who, under the authority of God, is able to wield such a power?
The answer to this question resides in ourselves, for it is us which hold the key to unlocking ourselves from our own self-imposed prison, lined with prejudice and cynicism. Everyone is a prisoner of their own experiences. We hold in our hearts, the ability to free ourselves, and yet we languish in this cage of ignorance, hoping for salvation from a higher entity when in truth, we are only making the lock tighter, and the wall thicker. No one can eliminate prejudices, we can only recognise their presence, and from this we can truly know who we are. Yet, now, in this period of political demagoguery and moral ambiguity, it is increasingly becoming more difficult to distinguish our own prejudices from those held by the majority. A great many people think they are thinking, when in reality they are simply rearranging their own prejudices, moulding themselves into something that appeases society as a whole, something that contradicts the own fibres of their beings. Yet, by frantically indoctrinating ourselves with this microcosmic paranoia, we are only surrendering ourselves to our own fundamentally most primal instinct, fear.
Fear is a choice; we can allow ourselves to control our fears, or be controlled by them. Remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. Though the junior Senator of Wisconsin has caused a situation of alarm and dismay, remember that the fault lies within us, for Senator McCarthy did not create this fear, he merely exploited it. No one man can terrorise a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
Issue No.56 - February 9th, 1954
“Ignorance is bliss.”
Humanity in its entirety is a species that is constantly gripped with fear, fear that stems not only from what we can comprehend, but from what we cannot. We are a fat, complacent species, a race that cannot, and perhaps, will not be able to understand truth when faced with it, for we have an in-built aversion for unpleasant or disturbing information, an allergy that is only rectified by the mass media. In this case, the media is our salvation, for they distract, amuse, and insulate us from the hard, unforgiving landscape of reality. To a large extent, the society we live in is an imitative one, one that demands submission through the use of the communist ideology as a “weapon designed and use to whip men into surrender.”
Yet, I do see a glimmer of light flickering at the end of the tunnel, a hope that is so faint, yet still allows me to maintain faith in the future of American society. Like the impossibility of men ‘to conceive morality without sin as of an earth without “sky”’, it has become impossible for myself to accept the presence of ignorance without an iota of wisdom and awareness. The world we live in is one gripped by the constant conflict between “two diametrically opposed absolutes”, and where there resides a battle between Capitalism and Communism, so too resides the encompassing struggle between the truth and the lie.
This hope I see resides in the team of the CBS, and the crew of See it Now, who have chosen to liberate themselves from the governmentally-imposed crucible of indifference. They have invested themselves, risking their own reputation to impregnate and disseminate the fallacies wrought within Senator McCarthy’s fortress of baseless allegations. We have been forced to accept the fact that “a person is either with the [government] or he must be counted against it”, and there lie “no road between”. The government has simplified the struggle presently ensnaring our society, for they believe that today is a “precise time”, a time where “we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good”. Yet under this superficial veneer of lies, the minority have taken it upon themselves to educate, to communicate and above all, to speak the truth. They aim to persuade, and in order to be persuasive one must believable; to be believable one must be credible and to be credible, one must be truthful, and therein lays the fault, for the oldest problem in the relation between human beings lies in what we say, and how we say it.
Upon watching the crew of See it Now, and those like them, individuals who have chosen to see past the lies and pursue the truth; it has imbued me with a compulsion to fight this fight and to do away with the political equivocation. I see goodness in these individuals, and if there is goodness in them, there must be goodness in us all.
FINAL – Issue No.68 - March 9th, 1954
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Never was Shakespeare more correct than when he has Cassius note this iconic line. Indeed, the fault does not lie in Communism, but in our pervading fear of it. We cannot attribute our own indiscretions to the diabolism of the unknown, for it is precisely that, unknown. Our history will be what we make of it, and should we allow historians 50 years onwards to perceive this period as an era dominated by escapism, decadence and insulation? Should we allow our progeny to reflect upon this period and see an America by ignorance? No, we should not. I see the true nature of our society, it is the best and the worst, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong and it is upon us to determine which we choose it to be.
Good Night, and Good Luck.
word count: 1,346
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