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Belonging Essay

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Belonging Essay
The human experience of belonging is an eternal struggle to find our place amidst a paradox, where the acquisition of material symbols of superiority disconnects and disempowers individuals’ sense of belonging. The poems of Peter Skrzynecki, ‘Ancestors’ and ‘Feliks Skrzynecki’ along with Milos Forman’s film, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and YouTube clip ‘Symphony of science’, recognize how the passing of time in any advanced civilization includes the formation of organizing institutions that restrict individualism and camouflage the fundamental truth of belonging to one another and to the Earth atomically.
The cyclic nature of access and maintenance of power includes propagandizing that accentuates belonging to tribes and incites xenophobia’s. In the film, a symbolic nirvana of Chief Bromden’s tribal background is portrayed through persistent tribal rhythms in the final scene as he elopes into the life-affirming wilderness. Pre Columbian America represents a period before colonization where the fundamental truth of belonging to the Earth, and to one another atomically satisfied a simple path to happiness. This is also supported in ‘symphony of science’, whereby powerful use of anaphora, “we are all connected; to each other, biologically; to the earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe atomically” redefines the scientific truth that every human being shares a common ground with one another. However, European immigration eventually usurped the native culture and tribes like Chief’s were forced to assimilate into the ‘white man’s’ way of life; institutionalization. Even today, the underlying human instinct to belong to a tribe is accentuated as the conformist notions of society coincide with one’s struggle to reach autonomous culture. In ‘Ancestors’, irony emphasizes the physical, emotional and ideological gap between Peter and his Ancestors, and illustrates the possibility of him ever belonging to his Polish culture as being utterly farfetched, “from

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