Grade: 9

Bio: Currently, soccer teams and the HOSA medical club fill Jacob's weekly schedule. If he ever finds himself with a little bit of free time, he loves spending it illustrating, especially scenes in nature. Various types of philosophical books and essays also pique his interest, and he plans on starting a philosophy club here at Heritage next year.

What motivated you to write this piece?

2020 is often described as an objectively bad year, but the human race has seen some pretty bad years before. However, what deeply struck me about the year 2020 was how divided we were in a time when we as a nation and as a species desperately needed unity.

What was the most difficult part of your writing process for this work?

I write sporadically so my ideas and emotions tend to flow and rhyme, yet they don’t always flow in a ten syllable ABAB rhyme scheme. I was deeply inspired to write the poem so restricting the inner voice to only 10 syllables was difficult.

What message do you hope to convey to the reader through your piece?

I plead to anyone who reads my poem to reflect within them and find some shred of doubt in every ideal they hold dear to them, and find a morsel of truth in the ideals of their enemies. I know that may sound drastic for a simple sonnet, but this mentality that we feel that we have the answers to all the extremely complex moral dilemmas of our time is what I believe to be the culprit of the current division in the United States. In an age where the internet has an unfathomable amount of perspective to gain, we still find ourselves over-simplifying and straw-manning our “enemies”, who came from an equally complex background that formed the mentality they hold dear to them today. This firm resolution to put these intricate arguments and emotions into political buzz words in order to over simplify opposition comes from our fear of ignorance, the fear of situations being more complex than they seem, and the fear that the core of what we believe and what we form our identities around could possibly be false. There certainly is objective truth to certain virtues and vices of the conflicts plaguing the United States, but entirely undermining and shutting off constructive and civil debate will be the decline of great democratic nation.