Paranoia Is Real

     For our English Literature class, we are reading the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. This book is set in a dystopian society where there are very few fertile women, so the few women who can bear children that are left have to repopulate the Earth. Rich commanders and their wives use these women to make babies, but have religion and rules controlling all of them so no one has the pleasure of sex, because it isn't necessary. In class, we did an experiment with the whole class to demonstrate the every day reality that the handmaid's (the fertile women)  have to deal with.
     The way we did this was by putting up everyone's school ID on the board and there was an indication of your position by your name. You could either be a regular hand maid, a rebel who was trying to get out and rescue the rest of the handmaids, or an eye, who is a spy for the government who are trying to catch the rebels and keep the handmaids down. During the "day" period, everyone is a handmaid and no one knows who is a rebel or an eye because no one knows any one else's school ID. At "night" though, everyone keeps their head down. Rebels can quietly communicate and rescue a handmaid. If they mistake an eye for a handmaid, then they are "killed". Every day, the handmaid's choose someone to kill off, in order to prevent a violent out break. The handmaid's must try to figure out who is an eye so they can kill them and who is a rebel so they can save them.

    By the end of the project, everyone was very paranoid and some people even got very emotional and hurt. It was crazy to see how people acted in a tense situation. Some people stayed quiet. Others tried to lead, and generally that made them look suspicious. I was always thinking about how did I look. There were very obvious sides and groups and if you didn't associate yourself with one group, you became a target. Sometimes the rebels were trying too hard and pushing too hard, which made them look like an eye because their actions were suspicious. In our class, and in mostly every other class, the Eyes won, which is very disconcerting. It definitely gave me perspective about the book. I understood why the made were very careful and paranoid. I saw how someone have that much control over you and knowing so little information about your safety can make you very skittish. I could never let my guard down because my life depended on it. There was no easy way to go about it. Once some one thinks you are suspicious, for any reason, it's very easy for them to substantiate why they should kill you off. Group mentality came out to play during this experiment, too. We often ganged up on the person we were going to kill. We technically didn't have to kill anyone for three days in a row, but almost everyday someone was killed. The craziest experience was when one girl was going to be killed and we all pointed to her and she was so confused, she said, " What? NO! Who?!" And another girl shouted out her name even louder, expecting the group to follow suit, but no one did. She shouted out the other's girl's name alone. The other girl turned the mob around and pointed every one towards killing the girl who shouted out the first girl's name. This happened in a matter of seconds and I still don't quite understand how it happened. After the experiment everything looked sketchy and I was still very paranoid. We were all laughing from the nerves. I felt trapped, even after I left.

Realistic View of How You Are

     In my English class, we did this social experiment  where we decided what we value most and we evaluated what that means and what that says about us. An angel means that you don't lie at all. A serpent means that you lie and it doesn't matter to you if you lie. It's not going to make you have a guilty conscience. A lion means you like violence and lean toward that as a reaction. A lamb doesn't agree with violent actions.
      I categorized my self as a serpent lion. This sounds really horrible, but I have my reasoning. There is an appropriate time for everything, and I think that's what people generally don't understand. In theory, yes, I would like to be an angel lamb, but I don't think that's very realistic. I know that if someone killed my sister, who is my best friend and is the closest person to me, I would have the serious, gutteral, visceral urge to kill that person. Whether I act on it or not depends on my actual limits. I think that I could kill someone in that situation, but I can never (and should never) know if I actually could. I'm just being realistic with myself in that I know that would be an option for me. That also doesn't mean that I would think myself above the law. I should still be punished for it, but I would still kill for my sister. I would like to never lie, but I know that I do, especially white lies. I also think its alright sometimes to lie in order to protect someone. If we didn't lie, we would never have Santa Clause, and what a sad world that would be.
     It was interesting to see who was in my group. I was surrounded by a bunch of boys. Typical violent boys. But then there was also Jackie Saplicki, and to me that made so much sense that both of us would be in that group. We have very similar values, and this situation I think we have very similar thinking. I know that we would both kill for our sisters, even if we felt guilty after words. That's the thing that would trigger both of us. We would have the same reaction to someone hurting our family because we are so close to our families.
       I think some people weren't very truthful with themselves, either. I think some people categorized themselves in a group of what they wanted to be, or what thought they thought that they could potentially be. I chose to look at what I would do in the most extreme situations and what I am capable of. Generally, I don't think I act like a serpent lion. But I don't think in the most extreme situations that anyone would be an angel lamb. Also, part of the experiment was that we place where we were on the graph, the more violent the higher towards serpent, etc.
                                                                      serpent


                                       lion                                                             lamb

                                                                       angel
I am not all the way to each extreme. I'm not entirely a lying serpent and I'm not entirely a violent lion. I'm somewhere off of the middle point where everything intersects. I would like to be in the middle, but no one is perfect, and no one is exactly in the middle.