We talked about issues of loyalty, dealing with the past, and coping with percieved threats. In the novel, Obasan dealt with trouble by being silent. Emily wouldn't shut up and kept agitating. Naomi is closer to Obasan in the spectrum, but it certainly doesn't seem as if any of the characters have found a sort of magical cure.
In one class, we moved on to talk about honesty within families. You'd want to know if your family had some hidden secret, even if it didn't directly affect you (e.g. one of your parents had a brief marriage before you arived on the scene). Yet, you noted that quite frankly, you've been in situations that you feel are none of your parents' business, or that perhaps they would not approve of the situation, but you trust your own good judgment and justify not saying anything to them because you think they'll over-react. The question I posed was this: how come you deserve honesty in matters that don't directly involve you, yet they don't deserve honesty in matters that do not directly involve them? It's worth pondering. All of you said that your parents have given you good advice, and you do honor their opinion. Perhaps some of the splendid questions you developed could be fodder for dinner conversation.
I asked you for homework to address the following:
Under what circumstances should loyalty to each matter more than any of the others?
In other words, under what circumstances should you put "self" before "family" or "family" before "friends." I'd like you to write a page long journal entry on this. If you'd like to post it as a lengthy comment, that's fine by me. Be sure to bring your vocabulary books with you tomorrow, and write sentences on the wikispace.
Taking care of yourself is very important, but without family, friends, society, and earth, your self will not be able to function normally. It is rare that one would come across a situation that affects the whole earth. An act such as terrorism, or being part of a war are just two instances that can change the world as a whole. Your own personal beliefs will help you choose which ring should come first. If a country wages war on your own, but your family is from the opposing country, what do you do? It depends all on loyalty here. I'm going to use the "spiderman" situation for family and friends. Lets say some evil villain has your family over one boiling pot of lava, and your friends over another. This decision is almost impossible to make unless your parents/guardian was extremely cruel to you. (I called it the spiderman situation because in the first spiderman, Peter Parker has to choose between this box full of kids he doesn't know or his lover - Mary Jane.) But think about what life would be like with out one or the other. A life without friends would be very boring and secluded. But a life without family could mean poverty (depending on how old you are or who actually cares about you outside your family). A lot of factors come into play with this kind of situation, and there is definitely not one sole answer to this question, which is probably why we were assigned this journal: To show the many different views our classmates have on this. (I could be extremely wrong about that though). Another good example is the Don Forti philosophy. At the beginning of the USM football program, Mr. Forti tells our team that first comes family, then friends, then religion, academics, then football. For the most part I agree with this, however I am not the most religious person out there, so I believe that academics and religion should be switched around, which just goes to show you that people have completely different beliefs about what comes first and what matters most to them.
ReplyDelete-Alex Read
P.S. - In the previous entry, I said it was a "box" of kids, substitute this word with *tram*. It was a tram with kids in it.
ReplyDelete-Alex Read
When deciding whether to put yourself before others, it completely depends on the situation. When the air pressure changes in an airplane, and the oxygen masks come down, there is a reason that you must put yourself first instead of helping others; if you pass out, there is no way that you can possibly help others in need of assitance such as a child. In this situation, putting yourself before others is vital to the survival of you and those surrounding. When there is a house fire, you are supposed to leave the house immeadiatly. Not doing so could result in your own death. You should let the firemen do their job and save whoever is inside. Putting others before you can also be important. You could let someone who looks like they are in a hurry at the grocery pass you in line to help them out. When adults don’t have enough to care for their family and themselves, they should put the children first and do what is best for them instead of thinking about their own needs. If this means not feeding yourself first at a family meal or not eating at all for a day to feed the younger children then that’s what should be done. Life or death situations are difficult. An old man should probably not cut in front of a baby and mother to get a vaccine that saves them or the last drink of water. It all depends on the person and how important their own lives are to them. When choosing whether to put yourself in front of others, consider the circumstances.
ReplyDelete- A little scattered I must admit
Taylor H.
By the way*, Jack was looking for the "A" grade by giving it an "A."
ReplyDelete*sort of a coincidence how I subconsciously incorporated a Red Hot Chili Peppers song name into an excerpt about Jack... this has got to be symbolic. 20 years from now when I write astounding novels of poetry I will look back on this day as the turning point in my career.
After retiring as a world-renowned poet I will also prove string theory, cure AIDS, and save the rainforests.
Alex-
ReplyDelete3 things
a) awesome W.C. on "secluded"
b) classic examples
c) people who use parentheticals in their writing will rule the world someday. Global domination- you and me- add that to my list of things to do after retirement.
I don't know if this counts as a correction or not, but you wrote Semester 1 as the heading on the post instead of Semester 2.
ReplyDelete-Wil Gibb
After struggling for a while to find some simple "rules" as to who should be notified should a situation occur, I came across a sort of non-solution, something that may just be refrasing the question. The group that you should be more loyal to should the one that gains more, or loses less by gaining loyalty.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, looking foward to see the consequences of one's choice is very difficult. One things could lead to another, and a seemingly meaningless incident could result in unexpected problems later in life. On the other hand, something that seems like the most important thing in the world at the moment, as is often the case in a typical teenager's world, will be forgotten weeks, days, or even hours later. A way to clearly see the repercussions of a decision would be the greatest way around this situation, but to that I have no answer. Unfortunately, this is the problem we are asked to solve, or at least give a plausable answer to. I could only give a (small) number of circumstances that would provide and answer, but those would all be relatively straightfoward, and still would be fastly outnumbered by the "moral dillemas" we are asked to work out. Many "checks" that we learned in our 8th grade "Morality" (not Molarity) unit have been suggested to help people make moral decisions, such as the "headline check," the "gut check," and the "legal check." However, no matter how many of these checks are made, there will still be exceptions to the rules, and situations that are truly unique. I think it would be futile to try to create a set of rules that would be applied to all situations. Every one must be judged individually.
Having finished this somewhat well thoughtout answer to the question, I have realized that I have done a very good job of using a lot of space to basically say, "I don't know."
However, to give some example, however futile I may think it may be to just one of an infinite number, I will provide one that I have often experienced and is especially meaningful to me.
I have three brothers. By the time I reached Middle School, one had already graduated from college, and two were in college. Since then, I haven't gotten to see my brothers very much. Only holidays and rare special occasions do I get to see them. As a "family vs. friends" battle, I present the following situation, which has often taken place.
During a holiday, when all my brothers are home, a friend calls me asking to come over. To me, it is very easy for me to answer "No" and place my family above my friends. I see my brothers rarely, and would prefer to savor the few moments I spend with them, rather then go over to a friends house and play video games with someone who I see pretty much every day. To another person, say someone who has younger siblings, or an annoying relative, they would jump on the oppurtunity to escape the house. They would place their friends above their family.
Paul M.
In any situation that involves a decision, you have to weigh the benefits for yourself versus the benefits for the community. The Japanese internment was the result of governments (like the US and Canada) believing that it would be better for the country as a whole if the Japanese were interned. Whether or not this was the right choice and more importantly if it was for the right reasons or not, is a different question entirely. But it's clear that whether racially biased or not, those governments made a decision to put the country's good before the good of the Japanese people.
ReplyDeleteMuch like the Canadian government, we as people are forced to make decisions whose consequences will have different impacts on both self and community, and we must weigh these two sides to determine the right course of action. To do too little for the community would be being selfish, which is seen as a very negative thing; but could being selfless, considered a virtue by many people, be equally negative?
Now clearly the issue isn't as black and white as we might like, and certainly a decision must be highly contextualized, both situationally and personally, but finding a balance between selfishness and selflessness is of the utmost importance for anyone who is, or aspires to be, a leader.
And if we look at a situation with both a quantitative and a qualitative approach we should find a clear "right" path.
First, look at the number of people a decision will affect, and which decision would benefit the most people; in the case of internment, relatively few people would be disadvantaged when compared with the entire Canadian populace. Then the most important part comes. A qualitative review of what the benefits are to each side of the decision, what the consequences are of each side, and how important the decision is (if it needs to be made at all). This is where the Canadian government took its misstep. Influenced by racism both in government and the racist sentiments of the Canadian people, Canada perhaps overlooked the qualitative approach to looking at exactly what would happen to these Japanese, their own citizens. The infrastructure and management of the deportation, the question of what would happen to their belongings, where they would go and what they would do there; all of these issues were clearly overlooked or purposefully made unpleasant for the Japanese. This act of favoring the group as a whole over a small community can't be considered selfless either. It was not a self made decision; not only did the Japanese not choose this for themselves but it was a decision made without any input from the Japanese at all. And finally the Canadian motive was flawed. Although the official excuse for their internment was "for their own safety", to protect them from the Canadian people, the conditions of their deportation and the liquidation of their property was most certainly not a gesture of kindness or an act of protection. It even leads us to believe the opposite, that the Canadian government did not really want the Japanese race in their nation, and simply used the war as an excuse to inconvenience them and force them to go home (or at least make them so miserable that they would want to).
The Canadian internment of Japanese-Canadians thus gives us an example of a poorly weighed decision. And although the decisions we make might not have the same consequences or carry the same weight of those made by governments, they are important nonetheless. After the options have been established and the relative benefits and consequences weighed, making sure that the means are not so unreasonable that they render the ends meaningless must be the main consideration of any decision.
For any decision, the outcome should benefit the community more than an individual or small group of people, but if the inconvenience or risk to the individual or group outweighs the benefit to the community as a whole, then it is not a worthwhile choice.
While everybody values many different figures, objects, and ideas in life, it is likely that each person will have to put things in perspective and make a logical decision over which matters more. In what scenarios is it necessary to save oneself over others, ones family over friends, and every combination in between? In order to better understand when it is important to put one group in front of another, one most compose several examples. Analyze possibly the deepest most thought-provoking quote ever to be uttered: “There will come a time when you might have to decide who lives and dies out there” (Ben Randall, “The Guardian”). If one imagines that his five family members, seven dearest friends, and entire community that he grew up living together with were stranded on separate rafts in a freezing cold ice storm in the Pacific Ocean. While family members (assuming a loving relationship exists) may be the ones that are most desirable to save, the group of friends, and more significantly, the group of hundreds of villagers are a larger number of lives. While it is understandable that one would forever regret the decision to watch his family perish when he had the opportunity to keep them alive, at what point is more life more valuable than a closer relationship? Assuming it is possible to save only one raft, I would find it hard to stay conscious with such a heart-breaking task at hand. In the end, I believe that I would save my community first because I would find it harder to bear the fact that hundreds of innocent souls were lost on my watch and because it would be an incredibly selfish act. While I love my family dearly, I would hope that each of them would understand my situation in the way I do and realize the right thing to do, as opposed to the thing I most desperately want to do (plus, according to my Christian belief, I would be reunited with them up at the pearly gates soon enough and this night would make an extremely interesting dinner topic- an eternity is too long to be filled only with awkward silences). Another scenario that is not nearly as life-changing or “lose-lose,” is if a friend hacked into the school’s network and changed both his and several other classmate’s grades. You find out about this and accidentally are overheard by the Dean of Students. You are interrogated and given the option to be expelled or sell out the devious plotter and have him be expelled. While expulsion is a slightly more extreme consequence than this situation deserves, it is necessary as otherwise you might not mind “taking one for the team.” In this case, because my entire academic career and possibility of being accepted into one of my preferable colleges would be on the line, I would not ponder the situation too long before I gave the hacker’s name. I was not at fault, and he was, therefore why should I pay such a harsh penalty that would significantly alter my life for something I didn’t do. While no one wants to be a “rat,” a case in which the results ends up very poorly for you and nothing for the criminal is when you need to be sensible and put yourself first, especially because you deserve it. In the end, the situation you are in, the people involved, and the price for placing one in front of the other all affect the decisions a person makes. Whether it’s a life or death matter or if he is unsure how a person will take a bit of news, it is never easy to make a choice that harms someone or hides something. He must know when it is more important to be selfish than a hero. This is why it is hard for me to understand a suicide bomber’s mindset. I cannot imagine how someone would put his religion before his own life. On the other hand, Christianity, the most widely followed religion in the world, most likely would not be where it is today without martyrs. With this in mind, I have come to the very simple conclusion that there is no right or wrong answer as to who comes first. For a given problem, a person may place himself first, his family, his friends, or even his pet toad who he knows will only survive for a few more days. While there are advisories to think realistically during a fire or a rainstorm, because events of people going back into a burning building to save pets or driving up to family even though the roads are severely dangerous have come up, it is certain that not everyone thinks like one person and vice versa. So long as a person feels he has made the right decision in his mind, and is willing to pay whatever consequences, any biased placement of any aspect in life can be justified.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to note, that it was very hard to put the examples into third person without is sounding extremely forced. That is the reason for person change, otherwise I tried to keep it to 3rd person throughout (except when I included my opinion, of course).
ReplyDelete