Thursday, May 2, 2013

Crime is Pride...or is it?...

525 words


Think: all men make mistakes

But a good man yields when he

Knows his course is wrong,

And repairs the evil: The only

Crime is pride.

According to this excerpt from Antigone, by the classical Greek playwright, mistakes are bad; that they make you an evil person if you don’t go back and fix them. True, if you steal from a store and don’t feel a smidge of remorse this doesn’t apply to you because you are on track to becoming a serial killer. Mistakes that can hurt or harm others should be gone back to and fixed but what about a simple, innocent mistake? If someone was hanging out at the mall and thought they saw someone and called out to them but it turned out not to be who they were expecting, they don’t have to go up to the person and ‘repair the evil’ mistake. It was an honest mistake.

But there are also some mistakes that have created things we would never have invented if someone hadn’t let their mind wander a little too long. For example, the microwave oven. Percy Spencer was an engineer who was experimenting with radar and vacuum tubes when he noticed that the bar of candy that he had in his pocket started to melt. He decided to test this on other things like popcorn and ta-da! You have yourself an invention that is used in most homes in America every day. What if Percy Spencer hadn’t had a candy bar in his pocket that day? We wouldn’t have a microwave oven. It’s as easy as that.

A different example would be when two brothers tried to boil a pot of grain, they accidentally left it on for too long. When they went back for it, the grain had molded but there was something else, too: a dry and thick product. When the brothers the mold off, they were left with a golden brown flake known to every American household: Corn Flakes.

Now, I don’t know about you but I don’t know what I would do without my microwave oven or my bowl of corn flakes in the morning before school. I am glad that these people made the mistakes they had made. What if Percy Spencer had realized, ‘oh I have a candy bar in my pocket! Better take this out!’ or if the two brothers hadn’t left the grain on the stove for too long and checked on it regularly? According to the excerpt from Antigone, they are evil people and should have gone back and ‘repair the evil’. But they aren’t. Percy created a faster way to cook food which shaves off hours of cooking and the two brothers invented an easy and healthy breakfast that will keep you full all day. I wouldn’t say those were products of evil.

Yes, some mistakes are evil ones and the people that make them should go back and fix them. But not every mistake is bad. So many things that we use in our day-to-day lives were created because of a simple mistake that someone made. If you make a mistake, don’t fret over trying to fix it if it was something simple. Even if it was something big, you never know what can be born from just a simple mistake.
 
~Skooogster(:

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