Speech About Belonging

Belonging, what Is It? I believe belonging Is when you can say that you are a part of something, when you have a group or a club or even a lifestyle that other people share. In short, I believe that a sense of belonging can be found in the things or people that have shared the same experiences, both good and bad, because we can identify ourselves in those people. Today we will be exploring this idea of belonging in two texts; one is the of poems “Fillies Crooknecks” and “SST Patriot’s College”, by

Polish-born Australian poet, Peter Crooknecks, and the other text is the 2012 movie “Wreck it Ralph”, directed by Rich Moore.

The poems “SST Patrick College” and “Fillies Crooknecks” both deal with the notion of self-isolation and an inability to relate to the people that surround a persona. In both poems, we can assume that the persona is Peter Crooknecks himself. In “Fillies Crooknecks” he talks about how he could never relate to his father and his father’s friends when they would reminisce of their lives In Poland.

He feels a sense of distance between himself and his parents’ culture that, as he says In the poem, he “Inherited unknowingly. In the poem “In the folk museum”, delectation from a culture Is also portrayed, but this time It Is about the persona’s lack of connection to the Australian culture. The persona describes the things he sees in the museum as if they are foreign and unknown to him, so much so that he has to read the names of the objects to know what they are.

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Text About Belonging

A reason why the poet doesn’t feel he can relate may be because he doesn’t share the same experiences and doesn’t have the same traditions and customs that other people, both his Eastern European parents had and his Australian culture, would have shared. He can’t relate, or reminisce, or appreciate either of his two cultures, because he has never known enough about them to have an emotional attachment, and It Is this lack of attachment that prevents him from feeling a sense of inclusion. The sense of exclusion from a group Is also present In the film “Wreck It Ralph”.

Ralph, who was the “bad guy” In an arcade game, was constantly ostracizes from the rest of he characters in the game. He lived on a pile of bricks far away from everyone else. He, like Peter Crooknecks, was often segregated from everyone else, except in the film, the exclusion was intentional. In the same way Crooknecks couldn’t help not being able to relate to his father, Ralph couldn’t help but break things, and the more he broke things, the more he would be distanced from the others in the game.

He would have felt helpless and isolated, and his hunger to belong with everyone else is what made him escape his game in search off medal to prove with worth. In one scene of the movie, Ralph is seen attending a “Bad-Anon”, a support group for the villains in the arcade games. Here he is able to communicate his Ideas and feelings to people who feel the same and go through the same things. Ralph can Identify himself In the support group because they all share the same experiences.

This act of comradely Indicates that Ralph does In fact know how to connect to others, but that his problem is that there is simply no-one for him to establish that friendship with. Another meets Ralph, she expects him to exclude her as other people do, but upon learning that he too is a rejected outcast, she reaches out to him and they become friends. This is a good example of how past experiences influence where we feel we belong. Their bond strengthens as the plot progresses, and as both Ralph and Penelope grow closer and closer, their personalities grow and they develop trait that they didn’t have before they had friends.

Penelope gains a sense of assertiveness, and Ralph earns to respect and consider people’s feelings. The characters in both the poems and the film both show the concept of not belonging. It is a theme that appears in art and modern media constantly, and portrays the idea that our experiences, both good and bad, influence who or where we feel we belong. We all root for the ones that overcome obstacles and win battles despite having disadvantages. We all root for the underdog; because we, as an audience, identify ourselves in them; because we have all, at one point or another, felt the same.