Today I write my very last blog post for this ASTU class. It’s quite interesting to look back on all the things I’ve learned, all the papers I’ve written, all the discussions our class has had. I can’t exactly pinpoint and describe all the skills I’m taking away with me after all these months of work, but there is one major theme that has caught my attention several times throughout our class – the concept of perspective.

From the very beginning of September, my classmates and I have been encouraged to think, over and over again, about our own views and misconceptions about the world and ourselves – we have been led to challenge our truths by expanding our worldviews. Very recently we watched American Sniper (2014), a movie that follows the trajectory of Chris Kyle, a nationalistic man deployed to Iraq as a sniper and hailed a hero in the USA for his impressive number of kills. Of course, the journey and ups and downs of Kyle are fascinating and his military success deserves understandable recognitions, but it does say something about our society when we choose to glorify a man who is, ultimately, responsible for the death of dozens of Iraqi people. The words ‘killer’ and ‘hero’ are certainly never used together to describe a single person, and yet both can be perfectly used when explaining the accomplishments of this man – after all, the more he killed, the more celebrated he was. Particularly in the Western world, we have come to believe in a strangely narrow narrative in which there are the “good” and the “bad” guys, a narrative in which we are the “good” ones fighting against all that is “bad” in the world. There is nothing wrong with desiring to protect the peace and defending those we love; but the minute we brand an entire group as ‘evil’ and decide that, in order to stop them, we must eliminate as many as possible, we begin a quick process of dehumanization – one that is hard to revert. American Sniper does a great job telling the story of Chris Kyle; but it is only one story. It is the war through the eyes of an American man – one who saw and perceived the world in a very specific, highly nationalistic way. The world, however, is made up of a series of stories and highly different recollections, and it is our job, I’ve come to learn, to listen to what these voices tell us. Months ago, our ASTU class read The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novella by Mohsin Hamid in which a Middle Eastern man moves to America to have a successful career and gets his heart broken by an American girl. This book was powerfully symbolic in countless ways but, allegories aside, it was likely the very first I was being given the opportunity to read something from a non-Western perspective, and it truly opened my eyes to my own ignorance. Changez, Hamid’s protagonist, was the first narrator I encountered that told a new story – one lived by someone our society has come to brand as ‘different’, and it made me understand him not only as a storyteller, but as a person.

By avoiding works and stories that aren’t our own, we deny others a voice – we neglect an entire side of a whole story and, more importantly, we fail to see the humanity in others. Although we often fail to recognize this, the framework through which we perceive the world around us deeply affects our understanding of it and how we carry ourselves through it. It is incredibly important, in order to broaden our horizons and understand our own judgements, to remain open to the stories others have to tell us. To begin to understand humanity as a whole, we must stop ourselves from believing the only truth is our own, and begin to understand the world as a collective of equally important people, who face struggles and succeed together. Only then will we begin to truly thrive.