Kyle's Thoughts

  IGH! An unfamiliar sound to most, this is what echoed throughout the concert venue when Chance the Rapper performed. Not knowing who he was, I thought that Chancelor Bennett was just a typical rapper, composing songs about money, drugs, and violence. As this was my first time intently listening to him, I was surprised at the message in his music. He was on stage rapping about how growing up in inner-city Chicago, summers were fraught with violence and murders. But, the songs that he followed up with were about his faith in God. The polarity in content struck me, and I wanted to learn more about Chance and his testimony. The progression of his albums, I discovered, depicted the profound transformation in his life. His first album focuses on his high school experience and his 10 day suspension- appropriately titled 10 Day . Acid Rap talks about his experimentation with illicit substances. Coloring Book , his third album, is about him accepting Christianity. At the tail-end of this ...

 Before reading "The Convergence of the Twain," I knew it was about the Titanic but that was it. I assumed that it would be a solemn tone, painting the Titanic as a tragedy, like most others do. The connotation I automatically have with the Titanic is sad. However, the poem was not like this at all. It was sort of blaming the Titanic on human hubris and was saying that it was almost meant to be sunk. I got a tone of inevitability from the speaker, almost as if it were obvious that the "unsinkable" ship was meant to sink. This way of thinking makes me question. If we praise something for being a certain way, does that then make its end value the exact opposite of what we were praising it for? And then once it does the opposite, are we to blame society and humans for being to arrogant and prideful because they "hyped" it up? If we were to ask people who lived in the days of the Titanic, would they say that it was unsinkable or would they agree with the speak...