Emotive Ethics

The classroom goal for the children of Mr. Kanamori's homeroom class have a unique class goal than maybe some of us were used to in grade school.  The narrator of the documentary "Children Full of Life" shares that that "The class goal for grade four, is to understand how to live a happy life. How to care for other people.". This goal is something that in Western civilization many of us lack. Knowing how to be happy and how to care, seems to have been drowned away by trying to be  overly successful.  Like in our UGS class, Mr. Kanamori has his children right journal entries to teach them how to express them selves and show his children that it is okay to feel the way you are feeling and its alright to express it. Like many of these children, I never cried in public. I would bottle up all my emotions and would never want anyone to see I was week. I still am struggling with this today, and I notice more and more that other people are doing this too. Author D. Goleman explains in his work titles "The Roots of Empathy" that "People's emotions are rarely put into words;" (Goleman 537). The highs and lows blog and exercise that Professor Bump has us do every week, helps to not only express some frustrations that occur during our week, but they also help me to understand my classmates better.

The documentary "Children Full of Life" has inspired me to be more in depth in my highs and lows blog. I sometimes only cover the basics of the worsts of my week without going into what really happened, but from now on I would like to be more personable. I might inspire my other classmates to talk about something in class that maybe they really needed to get off their chest, just like Ren did for Mifuyu.

Sharing feelings and emotions is difficult and often frightening to know what other people might think of you. However, in my experiences I have learned that not expressing feelings or concerns, only builds up to cause stress and worry in your life. I have realized for years I have been searching for happiness and I cannot remember when I lost it. In watching the documentary  I can see that these children are finding happiness that they might have lost by expressing their feelings and emotions. I can see it is important through Golman's passage that people need to have empathy in order to help others. He states, "the more empathic people are, the more they favor the moral principle that resources should be allocated to peoples need." (Goleman 540). Professor Bump teaches us to be empathetic towards all beings. We were all "born free" and each being should have the chance to enjoy those freedoms. Whether its through adoption or even expression of emotions (emotive ethics), we all are "born free" and deserve happiness.