This World and Me

In this post, I will provide an illustration for why humans are said to have fundamental rights, especially in a democratic society. I came up with this thought experiment when I was at fencing practice one day in my junior year of high school. At the time, I had been taking AP US Government and Politics. In order to understand the illustration, I have to explain a little bit of how fencing works. In fencing, there are three different weapons you can choose to fence: foil, epee, and saber. Although many fencing rules are shared among all three weapons, each weapon has specific rules that differentiate it from other weapons. At the time, my fencing club primarily consisted of foil and saber; our epee program was still quite young and did not have as many fencers at the time. In fencing, the field of play is called a "strip" (or a "piste"), since it is long compared to its width (14 meters by about 2 meters). Our club at the time had eight strips, and our foil and s...

A photo posted by Michael Zeng (@michaelzeng7) on May 14, 2016 at 8:11pm PDT

It started when I was 11. I was a fifth grader, or—as I had put it—a “senior” in elementary school. High school and college felt eons away, and middle school seemed merely an opportunity for renewed excitement. All of us were acutely aware that in middle school, there would be no recess, so we savored each day on the playground—each minute, each second. In the midst of this bustling playfulness, however, fear was lurking—a pervasive, subtle horror that guided the decision-making of nearly all children: the fear of being left out. It was amid this atmosphere when I started fencing. I suppose my path to fencing really started, then, before I was born. My parents are Chinese; they immigrated to the United States around four years before they had me. I often attempt to imagine what it might have been like for them. Everything that they knew—their people, their culture, their society, their language—all of it was gone. Truly, they must have felt alone, or perhaps left out. Yet somehow—an...