Good vs. Evil

      This month we read the book "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."  This book dealt with the tendency for humans to have two sides to them; good and evil.  I thought that question number 14 in our Socratic Seminar was very interesting.  This question asked whether or not Jekyll and Hyde were the same person.  I do believe that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person however they have different motives behind their actions.  For example, Dr. Jekyll's motive to get in touch with his Mr. Hyde side was that he wanted to feel what it was like to be "evil," and he never intentionally meant for anyone to get hurt.  However, once he came in touch with Mr. Hyde he became consumed with evil thoughts and he no longer could control himself.
      This can relate back to the play that we read called "Dr. Faustus."  Within this play Dr. Faustus was becoming in touch with the Devil and he tried to bribe Dr. Faustus to give up his soul to him.  When Dr. Faustus is in the midst of making this difficult decision he has two sides that are trying to persuade him; the good angel and the evil angel.  This is very similar to the good and evil sides that live within Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can also relate back to real life.  Think back on a time when you thought that you knew someone and they turned out being completely different than your original view.  This has happened to a lot of people including myself.  There was one time when I became very close to a new friend and after being friends for about three whole months she acted in a way that I had never seen her act before.  It was as though I did not know her at all.  This shows how it is almost human nature to have a good and evil side within them that can end up showing at different times.  It also shows that there are often times when no matter how hard we try, our evil side with reign supreme to our good side. 

Women's Rights: Then and Now

      This month we read many books and short stories which were all based on the main idea of feminism.  We read "The Awakening" which was about a woman named Edna who over time began to feel what freedom really felt like.  She slowly began to realize that she wasn't living the best life that she could as a woman and that she was not happy with her life.  She finds freedom in swimming and decides one day to swim out in the ocean too far and lets herself drown.  This shows that she wasn't afraid to live with freedom, and that she chose the way that she wanted her life to end; doing something that she loved.
      Edna was able to find something that made her happy and made her have the sensation that she was in total control of her life; swimming.  Although this is not a major event, it still symbolizes women finding something that they enjoy doing without having to worry about how the world will judge them due to their gender.  It is small leaps like this that have gotten us to where women's rights are today.  For example, there are women's teams for every sport, which would have originally been meant for only men.  In the Olympics there are men's and women's sports and they are fairly equally represented.  There are even women in the military now.  This was a big step because this shows that we are not afraid to allow both men and women to work together to represent our country and defend our country.
      This has affected me directly within my lifetime because I am very involved in things that women would not have been allowed to be a part of during the time that "The Awakening" was written.  I play soccer every day of my life, I am finishing out my high school education, and I am even getting ready to join the United States Coast Guard within the next 6 months.  I feel so blessed to be a young woman living in this day and age in the United States because not only do I have more decisions to make for myself, but I also get to choose exactly what it is that I want to do.  Some guys think it a bit strange that I, a woman, would want to join the military and get yelled at all the time.  My response is that it's something I want to do and that women can do anything men can do (and even better than men can at times).

Cultural Relativism Throughout the World

      I found the article called "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism" to be quite interesting.  It was about something that is a very common obstacle for many people throughout their lifetime.  The idea that different cultures have different moral codes creates the questions, "Is this something that can affect my life?" and "What do people from other cultures think of the way that I live my life?"  I am able to provide some insight into these questions due to personal experience in this area. 
      Over the past couple of months I have been able to get to know a foreign exchange student from The Netherlands.  He is studying at Millersville University and will be staying in the United States for the next semester.  He often asks many questions about myself and my daily routine.  It seems to be interesting to him because it is so different from the way he lived back home.  In the article it talked about how the Greeks would be in shock if they were asked to eat the bodies of their dead fathers.  I remember a couple weeks ago, the exchange student from The Netherlands called me to say in a very panicked voice, "My friends just made me eat bear and deer meat."  This was something unheard of when he was living back home in The Netherlands.  He seemed to be very disturbed that Americans eat deer (venison) meat, which is very similar to the reaction the Greeks had to the thought of eating their dead fathers corpses. 
      There are also many jobs in the world that allow people to experience many different cultures.  This means that in order to do this type of job you must be willing to work with people who may have different morals than you and you must be prepared for some confusion between the different cultures that you are going to be working with.  Some of these jobs may include certain types of engineering that go over seas to bring clean water to different countries or people who work in the government and then have to make peace with the governments in other countries.  For both of these jobs it is important that you have a good understanding of cultural relativism and that you are up for the challenge of working with people who are used to living a completely different life that you. 

The Temptation of Procrastination

     This month we read the play called Hamlet by William Shakespeare.  There are many different lessons that can be learned through reading this play and one of the major lessons is not to procrastinate.  This is often something that our generation hears a lot.  "Don't procrastinate," is definitely something that is said daily in my household.  In the play, Hamlet, Shakespeare does a good job of showing all the negative things that can come out of procrastination.  In the beginning of the play Hamlet finds out that King Claudius, his uncle, could have killed his father.  He says that he is going to get revenge on him yet he has to wait a little longer in order to have actual proof that he indeed did kill his father.  He puts together a plan to reenact the death of his father in front of King Claudius.  He plans to watch his reaction so that he can tell whether or not he actually killed him.  This plan worked and it was pretty clear that King Claudius had killed Hamlet's father.  However, even once Hamlet had this proof he waited and waited to actually act and kill King Claudius.
      This led to many tragic events throughout the rest of the play.  Hamlet became very anxious and was constantly paranoid about getting this revenge.  He ended up killing Polonious by accident and it all lead to the last scene where essentially all of the characters in the play, including Hamlet, meet their death.  If Hamlet hadn't procrastinated he could have simply gotten revenge and killed King Claudius without all of the other characters having to suffer.  This relates to my life in a way because for some reason I have a habit of procrastinating too much.  I am very good at getting all of my work in on time and maintaining very good grades.  However, I tend to put things off to the last minute, leaving me with a lot of unnecessary stress.  When I am stressed out I also tend to be in a bad mood, which means that my family suffers from my procrastination because I become stressed and then in a bad mood and they have to be around me when I am in these bad moods.  Similar to Hamlet, if I wouldn't procrastinate so much, I could save myself a lot of stress and save the people that live with me a lot of suffering due to my occasional bad moods brought on by stress.

Fate or Chaos Theory?

     Throughout this past month we have discussed a lot about the topics of fate and chaos theory.  We began by reading "Oedipus" which was about a king who was destined by the Gods to the fate of marrying his mother and killing his father.  As a baby when his parents heard of his fate, they left him on the side of a mountain in order to get rid of him so that he didn't have to live up to this terrible fate.  Although he had been raised and lived with a different family, he still ended up killing his birth father and marrying his birth mother.  In my opinion the Gods gave him this fate because they knew that as a human being he would try to do everything he could to escape it.  Then, by trying to escape and avoid it he would end up making it real and living up to this fate.  If he had not done anything to avoid it, it seems as though he would not have been in that situation at the end of the story.  During this month we also talked about chaos theory.  This is essentially the belief that most things are caused by slight actions or small decisions in your life.  We watched a very interesting movie which showed different ways that a situation could have played out based on some small decisions or actions done by the characters involved.
     I find myself to agree more with chaos theory and the fact that we really have majority of the control in our life.  However, I also believe that there are some things that no matter what we do, they will always happen because they were meant to happen.  A current example of this in my life is right now while I am going through my college application process.  I have made it a goal of mine to attend one of our country's military academy's for college and I just had my first interview with the Senator in order to get a nomination for one of the academy's yesterday.  I do not believe that it was already planned out for me whether or not I am to attend one of these academy's, however I do believe that it has been planned out for me to attend some type of college and further my education in some way beyond high school.  I have already been accepted into a good college and I believe that my acceptance into that college has absolutely no effect on my getting accepted to an academy.  Just as in the movie we watched, the man, Mr. Meyers, got into a car accident in every scenario we saw, I believe that my acceptance into this college is that one thing that was fated to happen in my life at this time.  However, my acceptance into one of the military academy's heavily depends on many interviews that I will have with many officials.  I believe that it is in my hands whether or not I succeed in these interviews and that I am the one able to control whether or not I am able to get into one of these academies.  Basically, I very much agree with the concept of chaos theory, however I also would agree that there a certain events in our life that we really don't have much control over and are simply fated to happen.

Fighting To Make A Name

I think that Question 12 of the Socratic Seminar for The Power of One covers a very important topic.  Examples of this can be seen in modern society and I can even relate this back to my life through personal experiences.  This question asks about the many levels of the word "fighter" that are used within the novel.  I believe that Peekay is the character that portrays the different levels of this word the best.  It all begins when he is a young child in a boarding school and, being the youngest, is forced to do what all of the other students tell him to do.  Peekay has to fight with himself internally in order to control his true feelings towards all of the other students, such as Judge, because he knows that the consequences will be bad if he does not.  Once Peekay is no longer enrolled in that horrible boarding school, he meets a man named Hoppie Greenwald aboard a train.  Peekay immediately idolizes Hoppie, who proceeds to tell Peekay about his passion for boxing.  Instantly, Peekay found himself intrigued, and after their conversation ended he made it his life goal to become the Welterweight Champion of the world.  This is the point in the novel where Peekay sets a goal for himself that he will have to fight for.  After many years of being told he was worthless, he is making the decision to fight in order to make a name for himself in the world.   

Peekay’s fight to make a name for himself through boxing closely relates to an experience I have had with soccer.  When I first joined the Oxford Girls varsity soccer team as a freshman I had learned that they had not won a game in three years.  During my freshman year we did not win a single game and I became determined to win a game before graduating.  This is similar to Peekay in the sense that he also set a high goal for himself.  My team went two more years without winning a game however there were glimpses of good soccer throughout all of the rough games.  Finally it happened.   Just two weeks ago our team won our first game in six years.  We had fought for several years to get to this point, and we will forever be remembered as the team that broke the losing streak and turned Oxford Girls Soccer around.  This is similar to Peekay in that he did everything that would get him one step closer to becoming the Welterweight Champion of the world.  And even though we never learn whether he made it to his goal or not, I still find this aspect of the novel to be very significant.  In my honest opinion, I think that Peekay’s fight to make a name for himself throughout the novel can be related to by many people in society.  The struggle to become known for something is very common in today’s society.