The Fall

Group 4 had to present Camu’s “The Fall” which I’m so happy I did not have to present. I could barely follow the logic in the way the sentences flowed. It reminded me of reading Romeo and Juliet in Highschool; a teacher was needed in order to point out the meaning in the use of the words. Anyway, Group 4 started their teaching of the material by having all the students write down questions that we could answer throughout the lecture. This was a disaster; not only did the questions not come up later in the discussion, but the way the questions were presented was horrible. The members of Group 4 dispersed across the classroom and each one read a question. The questions were way too long and read way to quickly to write down before another was given. There was probably like ten questions in all, but I gave up around the third one. If they ever have to present to a group of people again, they should realize that people need some time to write down information.

Now that is off my chest, let’s talk about the content. The main ideas that came up in the discussion were about judgement and innocence. I thought the best example of judgment came from the teacher, Thad said to think of a time where you judged someone. After giving a little time to think it over, he asked the class, “How many of you thought of a negative judgement?” I kind of felt bad afterwards because I definitely did. There is something about the word judgement that makes me want to think of someone being guilty. One person in the group said the quote, “ Always a reason to kill a man, but not to let a person continue on living”. The quote made me think about how we are so quick to find faults in others to make us feel better about ourselves.

I personally loved the innocence related scenarios. The main point that came across is that all people are selfish, therefore nobody is innocent. I believe that everyone is selfish but I don’t think having wants makes a person not innocent. Even before class, I did share the opinion that every choice that we make is because we wanted to make that choice. No matter what it is, we choose to live our lives the way we want. Even tough choices, one’s that are mistakes, or choices that we perceive for ourselves as wrong are because we want to make that choice. Whether the reason is because of a human instinct, moral righteousness, religion, or a promise ever action is because we ourselves want it. It is because of this that every person is selfish. After class, I asked Thad to give a situation where an action was chosen that we did not want. He the only one that he can think about is an action where we were not conscious of the choice such as accidentally doing something. Being selfish is usually thought of being a negative trait, but what matters more is what is your own reasons for being selfish.