Awakening—Discursive Essay
By Liu Han Feng (29), 4 Benevolence
19 Jul. 09
Awakening is powerful. When an individual came into the state of awakening,
drastic changes would take place on him, such that a hooligan could become a
scholar. When a group of people are awakened, the effect would be so
powerful that history may completely change its direction.
Renaissance
“Renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.”
-Anne Sullivan Macy
Awakening is powerful enough to free the mind of people in an entire
continent. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe entered a
period of history that lasted for a millennium. It was a millennium of
hopelessness, made up by endless warfare, widespread poverty, social chaos
and religious persecution, and it was called the Middle Ages, or the Dark Ages
as historians would later refer to it. During this particularly long period of time
of social decline, economy went crippled and technology ceased in its place,
due to the constraint of religious rules. However, after a thousand years of
silence, the Renaissance came as an awakening to the senile continent, then
shrouded in eternal darkness. All in a twinkling of an eye (compared to the
millennium) there was the rise of humanism, arts and science; and all too
quickly Europe started to modernize—economy soared and academy
flourished. The awakening of the thirst for the freedom of mind changed the
history of human beings.
Open door policy
“It does not matter whether the cat is black or white; as long as it catches the mouse, it is a
good cat.”
-Deng Xiaoping
Awakening is powerful enough to change the lives of billions of people. A
single political change, for example, can improve the lives of the whole country.
However, this political change is an awakening itself—in nature it is the
sudden realization of the need to change. This realization may only arrive after
decades of useless struggles, as they had failed in noticing that they dreamed of
an illusion, which totally misled their direction. Until the end of 1970s China
has long practised Mao’s class-struggle theory. This formed the basis of the
Culture Revolution from 1960s to 1970s, during which there was not much of
an economic momentum but chaos and retrogresses. When Deng Xiaoping
was back into power, the country has finally realised their mission of boosting
economy, instead of creating political upheaval, as the top priority. Under this
awakening, ideology was really a subordinate factor. This awakening has let to
30 years of rapid economic growth.
Rise to evil
“The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.”
-Adolf Hitler
Awakening is not always a good thing. When the evil side of human beings
are awakened, it may completely change the behaviour of a race, altering
them from benign and intellectual to aggressive and savage people. Even
until today, it is sometimes hard to imagine how the awakening of evil has
turned the rational and rigorous German people into beasts that not only
tried to wipe off an entire race but enveloped half of the world with flames
and ashes. Nationalism went into extreme; the evil and worst hysteria of lust,
triggered by the aggression of Adolf Hitler, were finally aroused. Only after
the World War II—when they have committed the worst crime in human
history—did they realised that their awakening was a powerful roar of their
devil side, together with a lie that they used to be so obsessed with.
Awaken is powerful, unimaginably powerful, as it is probably an eruption of
strength which has being accumulated for the past thousands of years, when
people of that time groped in the dark, trying to locate a direction, and
suddenly there was a flare of hope, and then, the dawn.