Prompt: Should people take more responsibility for solving problems that affect their communities or the nation in general?
Some people believe that one should only worry about their own problems, with the justification that the problems of the world have no direct affect on them. Content with this they bury their heads in the sand and go on living their lives. However, living in such a closed minded way, they fail to realize that their inaction can negatively impact themselves—as citizens of the world, the world’s problems apply to them. People should take more responsibility for solving world problems because the avoidance of these problems can and most likely will affect them. Several literary examples illustrate this.
An example of this is shown in Miller’s The Crucible, which follows the life of John Proctor during the Salem Witch Trials. John, at the outset of mendacious panic, is content with merely ignoring it since it had no affect on his way of life. He was erroneously misguided, though. By ignoring the problem in its nascent stage, he unknowingly caused his own death, as he is later accused of witchcraft himself. By then it’s too late for him to change anything and he is hanged for his alleged “crime.” Thus, John’s avoidance of responsibility for a problem in his society ultimately lead to his own death.
Another example is found in Ishida Sui’s “A Masked Tragedy,” a fictional novel surrounding the struggles of Kaneki following his half-transformation into a human eating ghoul. The world Kaneki lives in is plagued by these ghouls, and the government has instituted the massacre of these ghouls, despite their myriad of similarities to humans because of the problem of their food source. Kaneki decides to take up the responsibility of correcting this “wrong world” because he’s the only one who has a dual perspective of the matter, being half-human and half-ghoul. Therefore, the importance of taking on the responsibility of one’s world is shown.
Through the analysis of these literary works, it’s clear that the avoidance of one’s responsibility to world problems can negatively impact oneself.
