The Problems of Pushing Against Society - Essay Example

Both of these authors: Nancy Mairs and Terry Tempest Williams, show very different ways of dealing with their society, a society they find treats them unjustly. Williams essentially refutes and fights against her society, opting out of it as a way of countering it, while Mairs uses her own society’s tools against it, co-opting its language and mechanisms in an effort to make room for herself in it. Williams lives in a society that “respects authority” to a fault (Williams). They found it impossible to fight against the federal government of the United States for dropping bombs upwind of where they live – they did attempt to make a lawsuit, but not to be “against the government” but only to help ensure similar things would not happen in the future (Williams).

She grew incredibly frustrated by this style of acting and decided that it was important to fight against injustice, against authority, even if it meant giving up who she was. She found a way of fighting through leaving, through flanking. She reverted to her roots of Native American heritage, using it to attack the principles of land-hatred and disregard that had so plagued her family. She shows a method of pushing against society from the outside. Mairs takes a highly different approach. She sees herself as part of society, and uses the society she lives in to attack it, and push on it, in a different way.

She calls herself a “cripple,” a word that she finds appealing because it is “straightforward” and “honest” (Mairs). She uses this language to bluntly point out to society how they see her – not giving them the recourse of equally derogatory words (once critically examined) like disabled or handicapped. Thus Mairs is able to confront society with its own vision of herself, and make society face it – this is something that will hopefully make people critical of their own relationship to ability and the way they deal with it in their every day lives.

Society certainly puts pressure on each and every one of us, but it is also important that we put pressure on society. These two writings show two distinct examples of how to successfully do that.