Response to Sam Hammil’s “The Necessity to Speak” Essay

Sam Hammil’s essay is one that definitely caught my attention. He goes into explicit detail the penalty this world pays for not speaking their mind. He states that in not talking, we are all accountable for the wrongdoing of humankind. All parents should read this essay. I am a mother of two children and in his writings; he discusses quite often the consequences of not talking to your children.
In Hammil’s essay he writes that as human beings, “we go on living our sheltered lives” because “we can’t bear very much reality” (par 2). I would have to agree with this. I personally am not one that likes to hear about the awful things of the world. It scares me. In a very selfish way, I would rather go on living and not knowing the bad details. I say it is selfish because Hammil is right in saying that we all are “personally responsible for the deaths we buy and sell” (par 2). We are all choosing to ignore the fact that we just might have a say in what happens in our world.
In not teaching our children the reality of the world, we are not preparing them for the what-ifs. For example: What if my daughter is ever in a situation where she is raped, this situation could go one of two ways; She does not say anything for fear of being embarrassed or for fear of her attacker and the attacker continues to do the same thing to other women. On the other hand, I tell her when she is old enough to understand not be afraid to talk in these situations, because in talking maybe she can prevent it happening to someone else. My question to all of this though, is at what age do I decide to confront her with the possibilities that life can bring upon her? In telling her the reality of the world, am I taking away a piece of her childhood?
We should talk about sex and violence and when we see wrongdoing, we should speak up! As adults our responsibility is to speak our mind when something is not right. I do believe “In the language of violence, every speech is a solipsism and silence a conspirator” (par31). If I see that my neighbor’s husband is beating her, and I say nothing, I am just as much to blame as her abuser. We do not want to be in the middle though for fear of harming ourselves. Maybe letting go of that fear may save someone’s life someday.
In summation, we all may fear the unknown of speaking our mind, but if we choose not to, we are all at fault for what happens around us.

References
Sam Hammil, “The Necessity to Speak.” A Poet’s Work: The Other Side of Poetry. Seattle, Wa: Broken Moon, 1990

Here is a link that gives more info about the author Sam Hammil http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=2883