An examination of revenge and forgiveness
In Humanities we completed a project called An Eye for an Eye or "Drown the Book". We studied different cases of revenge and forgiveness in literature, history, and personal experiences. We started this project by reading The Tempest, William Shakespeare's last play that he wrote. The Tempest was a story about a man, Prospero a magus, who was sent to exile, with his daughter, from Milan. They ended up living stranded on an island, completely alone for 12 years. Until Prospero created a storm and sunk a passing ship that his previous perpetrators were on. The story follows the Prospero and his constant battle between taking revenge on the people who ruined his life and forgiving them for their wrong doings. Along with Prospero, we studied other men and women who had to make the choice of forgiveness or retribution. Mary Johnson had to make the choice when Oshea Israel murdered her 20 year old son. 12 years after Oshea was sentenced Mary visited him in prison. She told him she forgave him and they ended up becoming very close. Now they travel to different schools, prisons, churches to share they experience they had and how they gained a beautiful relationship from forgiveness. We also studied the LA riots revolving around the acquitted trial of 4 white police officers who beat up a black motorist, Rodney King. The community took "justice" for what the law failed to do and ended up killing 53 people, over 2,000 people were injured, and approximately 1 billion dollars in property damage and most famously, a truck driver was pulled out of his car and almost beaten to death by 3 black males. Another case of revenge that we studied was the Dachau incident. When US soldiers liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany they reacted violently to the horrors they witnessed. US soldier killed about 500 SS Guards on that day. We also looked at many other stories before starting preparation for our class socratic seminar. We formed different claims and used evidence to support our argument. My favorite part was connecting all the different stories to one other to support my claim of "Forgiveness takes a long time, but always provides a better outcome than revenge." I really like tying together all the different stories and incidents we learned about into one cohesive argument. I also really enjoyed the silent conversations we did in class. We read and annotated articles then wrote out different facts or ideas we had on a big piece of butcher paper at our table groups. Then you would respond to what other people were saying and others responded to you. It was interesting to see everyone form opinions. I think the silent conversations helped everyone think deeper to form responses and prevent ranting and getting to emotional. Overall I really liked this process and found the topic very interesting. Below are some examples of work I completed.
This is our claim evidence document we created in our group. We formed claims as table groups and whoever agreed with your claim would join your group. This was most of the evidence and talking points we came up with to support our argument.