Mob Mentality – Crucible Themes Project

The Crucibles Theme Project – Mob-Mentality[2788]

  1. How has the exploration of The Crucible deepen your understanding of diverse, complex ideas about identity, others, and the world?

The exploration of The Crucible for me has introduced new perspectives on human behavior for me, and how complex the mind can be. Something that stuck out to me in particular in the Crucible was how people behave themselves in desperate times when big things are at stake. For example, in the play The Crucible, when the girls start accusing people of being witches, the accused had a difficult decision to make, either join the girls and play it safe or stand up for what you believe and follow your own gut. It was basically a question of following what was right or what would keep you safe but put others in danger. What was disappointing but not shocking was that almost everyone in the play chose to save themselves. Yet, thinking about the topic in real life, there are many instances where people chose to put themselves before others in every day life like lying, picking sides and things like this, which are big parts of the Crucible.

  1. How have you personally connected to The Crucible?

The Crucible has connected with me personally through the message it gave. The main message that it shouted at me was to stand up for what you believe and to not jump onto what everyone else was doing, despite the problem being a lot more dangerous than a real life situation that I would face in every day life. There are instances where I would’ve been judged or looked at weirdly for a certain opinion I would have, but staying by what you say is very important to me, and that is why the Proctor was such a stand up character for me. He stood by his wife, kids, and what he thought even when it meant death. He was very strong and didn’t let anyone tell him otherwise, which is admirable. He was the main character who stood out to me which I could make a personal connection with.

The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald – Rose and Aleana

The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald is a ballad written by Gordon Lightfoot. The ballad includes a variation of themes, including environment and loss. The ballad ties in both themes nicely because each one comes hand in hand with the other. The loss was a product of their environment.

In this particular ballad, the scenes starts off with Fitzgerald on a large sized boat in Lake Superior in Ontario. It then says that it was a gloomy November and that harsh conditions had shown up early in the year, this is foreshadowing to the tragic events at the end of the poem. This represents the environment because essentially, the environment was the conflict. A perfect example of the tension it brought on would be the sentence: “When the gales of November came slashin’, when afternoon came it was freezin’ rain, in the face of a hurricane west wind.” (22-24). It showed us the dangers of their travels and what eventually lead to loss.

Now, after covering the theme of environment, loss also plays a role in this ballad. After the hurricane, 29 crew members were killed, and the loss is reflected on their friends, family and really anyone who was involved in their lives. There is a line in the poem that states that the church bell rang 29 times, one time for each man lost. It tells us that every man lost needs to be remembered and honored to give a sense of closure to the families of the lost ones.

Reflection – The Lottery

In Jackson’s “The Lottery”, she talks about tradition and the power it has over people. She shows us this by normalizing the tradition of the lottery everyone partakes in. To us, normal readers, the whole situation is scary and inhumane, but to the people in the story, people who have been celebrating the tradition for years and years, there’s nothing wrong about it in their eyes. It sheds light on how blindly people will follow something if it’s been practiced for millions of years. There are examples of things that should be forgotten because of changing times, like certain parts of religions that have been widely debated, but many people still choose to follow certain things because it is a part of the religion which is in a way a tradition.

In the short story, there is a part where old man Warner says that he thinks people who stop the tradition are crazy, which leads us to believe that most people have already accepted the lottery and the consequences that go with it without asking if it was worth it, or if there was even any truth to it. It shows that everyone had already made up their mind about the tradition and thought anyone who didn’t oblige was insane.

In conclusion, I think the author was telling us to be more aware of our traditions and how and why we choose to follow them.

Technology Paragraph

In this day and age, technology is everywhere. It has taken over our lives to the point were we are unable to envision a life without it, which is the epitome of dependency. So, yes, we are much too reliant on technology.

These days, anywhere we go we have our phones in our hands and screens around us. It’s impossible to escape technology even if you tried. When you go to work, there’s hundreds of new technology developed to make the occupation easier. We rely on these functions to do our jobs. At school, we use laptops constantly and would be unable to fit in without one. Even at universities, they look at your transcript online and they send your acceptance letters through email. There will be no such thing as paper in schools in no more than a few years.

Jobs and technology is a big issue. We’ve become so dependent on it that we’ve allowed it to take over our jobs. According to the CNN video “Technology is replacing jobs. Are you ready?” “people need to constantly change career to keep up with technology. 40% of our jobs will have been taken over by technology.” Which shows us how much we are allowing technology to control us. We let it seep into our lives deep enough that it has control over how we do our jobs and if our jobs need tweaking.

In conclusion, technology has overrun our lives. We drive ten minutes back home if we forget our phones resulting in us being late to work, and when we get to work, we let machines do our jobs for us. Looking at these facts, it is safe to say that if we don’t realize the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, we won’t spare a glance when evolution stops organically and starts artificially.