Writing PS. Worried about coming across as insane.
Posted: Sun Dec 08, 2013 5:13 pm
This is the first draft of my personal statement. I'm trying to find a balance between being interesting and coming off as a crazy person that no one would want to spend time with.
Think I went too far towards the second one.
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Justice is a prize seized by the powerful and denied to the powerless. That's a lesson I learned when I was fifteen years old.
As a child, I had been a stickler for rules. I dedicated myself to winning fairly or not at all, to treat people unequally was one of the gravest sins I could commit, and I was the only one in the crowd who said 'that should have been a penalty!' to protest sporting indiscretions by the home team. When the church my family went to that acted as my school solicited donations by telling stories of women subjected to horrific systemic abuse in India and then made it clear that they were concerned with the state of these women's souls rather than their bodies, I was appalled. The people being spoke of had rights irregardless of whether they belonged to the same religion we did, and wrongs committed against them should be amended. Surely, if I made this injustice sufficiently clear, the other people at my church and school would agree.
The parents disagreed strenuously. Their children disagreed violently. One day, during a break in classes, I was ambushed and attacked by the students there. One of them beat me with a yardstick enough to tear, bloody, and otherwise ruin my Sunday best clothes. My screams for help attracted the entire class, who either joined in, or stood around me, pointing and laughing. Eventually the teacher arrived, and I thought that everyone being told to return to class as though nothing had happened would have been the end of it.
I was wrong. The next morning, my family recieved a phone call from the teacher, and it was clear that I was the one in trouble. My attempts at explaining my own side of the story were ignored. According to the teacher, I had been responsible for starting the fight due to my 'disruptive' actions outside of class, and that she was seeing fit to arrange for my expulsion. With my family furious, I begged her for another chance. She relented, pending a parent-teacher conference.
I still remember two of the questions she asked at that conference. "Are you a homosexual? My [five-year-old] son is in the church, and I don't feel comfortable having you in the same building if you are." "Are you an atheist? If you're an atheist, there's no heaven or hell, and we're all going to the same place when we die, so why wouldn't you become an axe murderer?" I remained silent for most of the meeting, head hanging low. Of my two parents, one took the teacher's side and hasn't touched me affectionately since. The other said that they believed me, but that they could never say so when anyone else could hear, for fear that their friends and partner would leave them if it appeared that they agreed with me.
All rules, and systems made to enforce those rules, are ultimately designed by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to bias, to favoritism, to selectively enforcing rules in ways that benefit them and harm others. The perfect ideal of blind justice is impossible, and the implementation of the concept is improbable. Unless those of us who are dedicated to fairness and to equality work every day to bring reality closer to this ideal, it will forever elude us.
That's why I want to be a lawyer. That's why I want to go to _______________________.
Think I went too far towards the second one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Justice is a prize seized by the powerful and denied to the powerless. That's a lesson I learned when I was fifteen years old.
As a child, I had been a stickler for rules. I dedicated myself to winning fairly or not at all, to treat people unequally was one of the gravest sins I could commit, and I was the only one in the crowd who said 'that should have been a penalty!' to protest sporting indiscretions by the home team. When the church my family went to that acted as my school solicited donations by telling stories of women subjected to horrific systemic abuse in India and then made it clear that they were concerned with the state of these women's souls rather than their bodies, I was appalled. The people being spoke of had rights irregardless of whether they belonged to the same religion we did, and wrongs committed against them should be amended. Surely, if I made this injustice sufficiently clear, the other people at my church and school would agree.
The parents disagreed strenuously. Their children disagreed violently. One day, during a break in classes, I was ambushed and attacked by the students there. One of them beat me with a yardstick enough to tear, bloody, and otherwise ruin my Sunday best clothes. My screams for help attracted the entire class, who either joined in, or stood around me, pointing and laughing. Eventually the teacher arrived, and I thought that everyone being told to return to class as though nothing had happened would have been the end of it.
I was wrong. The next morning, my family recieved a phone call from the teacher, and it was clear that I was the one in trouble. My attempts at explaining my own side of the story were ignored. According to the teacher, I had been responsible for starting the fight due to my 'disruptive' actions outside of class, and that she was seeing fit to arrange for my expulsion. With my family furious, I begged her for another chance. She relented, pending a parent-teacher conference.
I still remember two of the questions she asked at that conference. "Are you a homosexual? My [five-year-old] son is in the church, and I don't feel comfortable having you in the same building if you are." "Are you an atheist? If you're an atheist, there's no heaven or hell, and we're all going to the same place when we die, so why wouldn't you become an axe murderer?" I remained silent for most of the meeting, head hanging low. Of my two parents, one took the teacher's side and hasn't touched me affectionately since. The other said that they believed me, but that they could never say so when anyone else could hear, for fear that their friends and partner would leave them if it appeared that they agreed with me.
All rules, and systems made to enforce those rules, are ultimately designed by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to bias, to favoritism, to selectively enforcing rules in ways that benefit them and harm others. The perfect ideal of blind justice is impossible, and the implementation of the concept is improbable. Unless those of us who are dedicated to fairness and to equality work every day to bring reality closer to this ideal, it will forever elude us.
That's why I want to be a lawyer. That's why I want to go to _______________________.