Conley's Cringe Essay:
-----------------------------------------------Cringe Warning---------------------------------------------------------
Conley ----
Ms. Alldredge
English 8
2 - 24 - 17
People don’t always make the right choice when faced with a problem. And they have a story, or a person, that they know is right, and is morally good. But they don’t always go back to that. Sometimes, people will go with what they think is right at the moment, and so if everyone else is doing it, they assume that everyone else must be right. Eventually, even the most important and influential story will fade under a new way of thinking. Everyone needs a person or story close to them and that is personal.
My story that I go back to is a simple one; It has been repeated many times. It starts with an idea, usually a bad idea, like the idea to kill a type of person, or segregate a type of person, or to judge someone by something that means nothing. Race and religion are good examples. A person finds a way to rise to power, or the idea rises to power, and it starts to become routine for someone to agree with this idea. The people who think it is wrong eventually fade away beneath the idea: that a person is not a person. This leads people to be okay with bad things happening. This has been repeated multiple times, such as with the Holocaust. We must not forget what has happened in the past so that we will prevent it from repeating.
This is a true story that has happened multiple times, but one doesn’t think of an idea as inspirational. One needs something closer to themselves to think of, something they can grasp. What influences my moral decisions is a person. I don’t know this person’s personality, I don’t know what this person is like. I do, however, know what this person did. This person knew how to make their voice heard. They knew how to make people change their opinions. So maybe it is not the person who inspires me, but the movement itself.
This person was Martin Luther King Jr.. What happened follows my story exactly, people thought, ‘Why not import slaves from Africa?’, and then later, some better person decided these people needed to be free. But this did not fix the discrimination. People still had the idea, that a black person is not a person. That people don’t deserve the same as other people, because of something that means nothing. And people were okay with this. Martin Luther King Jr., and the idea he stood for, was a good one. It inspires me that a system that is morally wrong will eventually fix itself, because of human good nature. This makes me believe that I can make a change, that if I am faced with something I will make the right decision. When I first learned of Martin Luther King Jr., I didn’t understand that it isn’t the person who is important, it’s the story.
Comments
Post a Comment