Blog #7

What is it about evil that makes it so appealing in the movies, like Anakin going to the dark side?  Why is it that a character who was good turns evil? Can a person resist the call for evil, even for something world-changing? These questions even pose themselves in literature as in The Picture of Dorian Grey, Dorian chose to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth, and he spends his youth degrading himself to murder, blackmail, and drugs. In Faustus, Dr. Faust sells his soul for knowledge, knowledge he'd use to conquer the world. Faust, a respectable man, sells his soul to Lucifer, the embodiment of evil, it isn't more of a role reversal than that. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll gives up his humanity because he enjoyed the reckless murderous beast of a form that was Mr. Hyde. This is relevant today because everyday people are succumbing to evil, there are murderers, rapists, and slave traffickers who all started as an innocent people, even Hitler was considered an innocent being at some point.

  In my opinion people aren't born evil, it's the events and choices that take place in their lives which turn them into evil beings. It's also in my opinion that people who were once evil can change. For example, Frank Abagnale Jr. was a famous check-forger and impostor who after a prison sentence turned his life around and became a consultant for the FBI and helped them catch forgers much like himself. To me evil is a path, anyone can take it, but the longer you stay on it the harder it is to get off, and that's why characters like Dorian Grey, Faust, and Jekyll didn't have a happy ending.

blog 6

When things are down or looking bad humans always turns to hope, but what can hope do? People see hope in two ways, the positive way being that hope is good and it acts as comfort to a person in need. The other is that hope is for the delusional and hope is just a buffer, preventing the taking of action, that stalls person from the inevitable. In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, hope is shown through many of the characters, from Laila's hope that Rasheed would leave her alone or her hope that she could get her daughter back from the orphanage. Both were the good types of hope that Laila truly believed would come true. The delusional type of hope was shown through Nana, Mariam's mother, Nana hoped that Mariam would stay away from her father but she knew it would never happen and so her hopes were just a placebo for the truth. Hope is still relevant today because hope is felt by everyone, whether it's a low-level business employee hoping for a promotion or the thousands of Syrian's hoping for food and shelter in the aftermath of their civil war, hope is everywhere.

In my life I can't even put the semblance of a number to the number of times that I have hoped for something. From a child to now I've always hoped for something for Christmas, and I'm I'll hope for something till I die. In my opinion hope is always a good thing. To me hope is like never giving up on something condensed into one feeling. To me hope is not delusional but a driving factor that gets things done. Basically, hope is what hard workers are made of and it's the hard workers of the world that get things done.