Maggie Gaster

5/20/08

History, Compassion, and Perspective

The way I see the world has a lot to do with the events of the past. Based on what

I know about how people lived, and what they lived through in the past, I know how

privileged I am. It makes me appreciate my life because I know I have it a lot easier than

the people who lived through the Holocaust and Apartheid. I can take comfort in the fact

that I am not a slave living in the south during the 1800's. Today there are a lot of people

in the world living in terrible conditions, and it's important to know about what's going on

outside of middle class life in the United States in order to put things in perspective. My

dad grounding me for a week is not as bad as not knowing if I'm going to be able to eat

for a week. Knowing that other people are a lot worse off than I am keeps me from being

resentful and negative about my life and what I have.

This year I've had the luxury of being able to apply to whatever colleges I want to

go to, and not have to worry about supporting myself for another couple of years. If I was

poor, and living in another Country, I might have to work to support my family. I

wouldn't necessarily be able to get a college education. In the United States, it's become a

requirement of the middle class to send their children to college before they're required to

get a job and support themselves let alone their families. The time line we developed in

the personal finance project would have looked a lot different if I was a seventeen-year-

old living in Afghanistan. I wouldn't be planning to put away a $200 a month for leisure

expenses and $100 a month on food. I wouldn't be spending any money on leisure it
would all go to the bare necessaries so that I could merely survive.

In ninth grade, when we learned about Apartheid in South Africa, it really struck

me. I was actually alive while Apartheid was going on. It was the tail end, but it was

happening. The strangest part was that I had never even heard about it until I was in ninth

grade, less than ten years after it was abolished. Terrible things were happening in other

countries right under my nose. While I was obliviously living my comfortable, safe,

middle class lifestyle. Learning about atrocious events that happened in my lifetime was a

lot more tangible than learning about the French Revolution or the Civil War or even

slavery. However, after I learned about Apartheid I developed a lot more compassion for

the events of the past. Each soldier that died in the Civil War could have been my father,

or my brother, or my boyfriend. For some reason just knowing that something horrible

had happened while I was alive, and that if I had been born in South Africa it could have

directly affected me, made history much more real to me.

This year, I decided to get to the root of why a human could justify treating

another human so badly. I explored morality in my Human Nature paper. I decided to

propose a new kind of morality based on the theories of Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama, and

Jewish philosophy. The three perspectives were very different, because I wanted to get a

wide range of opinions and philosophies on the topic. Nietzsche took the most selfish

approach; he proposed to create individual moralities exclusively for the benefit of the

individual. I didn't think that it was right for people to make their own moralities without

considering other people. Jewish philosophy took a far more benevolent approach and

went so far as to say that it would be better to throw yourself into a burning fire, than

embarrass another person in public. In between those two polar opposites was the Dalai
Lama's theory that you should have compassion for every human being because everyone

wants and deserves to be happy. If everyone in the world could learn to think about their

moral values in that way, people wouldn't do such horrible things to one another.

Because I was born into a privileged middle class position in the United States, I

feel that the best way to show my appreciation is create a morality based on a

combination of the philosophies that I researched for my paper. I do believe that everyone

has the same right to be happy, and that everyone is trying to find happiness for

themselves in one way or another even at the expense of others. When you think of it that

way, it's easier to empathize with people whom you don't agree with but you can have

compassion for them anyway.

History has taught me the importance of compassion in life. Because even if

you're not personally experiencing horrific atrocities, you can appreciate the difficulties

other people are happening and you can thank your lucky stars they aren't happening to

you. I am incredibly grateful that I wasn't born in South Africa, or born Jewish in Nazi

Germany during the Holocaust. All I can do is help out people who are less fortunate than

I am, and be as nice to everybody I come across as I can. But what I have learned most of

all, is that learning about history and economics puts my life in perspective, and gives me

a sense of where I stand in comparison to the rest of the world.