Year Three

Third year was a year of depressing courses.

When you take exclusively politics and history courses, the content tends to be a little awful. Particularly as the theme throughout all the courses I took this year was that humans are the root of all problems, and when issues happen to occur, they can be manipulated for increasingly evil means. Take famine for example. The Irish Potato famine was caused by a natural occurrence, a disease. However, the British imperial government saw an opportunity to turn this natural disaster into a genocide in order to enact their political plans.

This theme of humanity causing evil was repeated throughout all of my courses. I learned though this experience the importance of resistance to your previously held beliefs. Hatred for others can simmer under the surface until an event, such as a famine, plague, or war loss sparks it into action against this group, such as genocide, or willful ignorance of the conditions under which people who are considered to be “others” live.

While the content of my classes did not exactly inspire hope, my classmates did. I sat in classes with such passionate people, who were truly interested in, and starting to make a difference in their corner of the world. Personally, I helped with a TCSA (student union) campaign called Excaliburntout, which studied the ways in which students are struggling at Trent, and then advocated for increased supports from the Trent administration. Working on this project showed me how effective collective action and advocacy can be, and how passionate the people around me are about helping others.

While humanity has a lot of capacity for evil, we also have a lot of people who are trying to do the best they can to make the world just a little bit better, and that is enough of a reason to hope.