The Milgram experiment is one of the most famous and one of the most shocking psychological experiments at the same time. The experiment was conducted by Yale University psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in 1963.

 

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. (wikipedia)

The participants read the voltage rate on each button; they heard the person’s screaming behind the screen when each button was pressed; they knew that they were hurting the learner through electric shocks; yet they continued to follow the orders and constantly pressed the button with the higher voltage rate written on. Some people, during the experiment, refused to continue the operation. However, such resistances were temporal for the most time. They began the operation again once the conductor “ordered” them to do so. The participants questioned and wavered, but did not stop. Two thirds of the participants (although demonstrated hesitations up to certain degrees,) ended up giving the electronic shock of the highest voltage that will surely kill a person. Only the other one thirds stopped and “disobeyed” to kill a man. The result shocked the United States. None of the participants had committed any form of crimes. They were normal citizens that a normal person would meet while walking down any street.

Millions were killed during the Holocaust. Through the use of gas chambers, open-air shootings, and extermination camps, the Jews and “the inferior beings” lost their lives. When the war ended with Hitler’s loss, inhumane war-crimes of the Nazis were severely criticized. People questioned: how can a human being commit such a heartless violence on another human being? How could the Nazi guards push the poor, innocent people into the gas chambers?

Sinister intention, ill will, anger, and violence were not the motivations that drove the Nazis to commit their sins. Obedience—this simple ingredient of human nature was what made them heartless. The mass tends to seek a strong leadership. People always search for a powerful authority to rely on and expect the leader to give instructions.

Let’s think, people. Let’s question, people. Let’s stop, people. Do not think this scary rule of obedience applies only to the past events. Look at the Iraq war. The American soldiers killed, kill, and will kill the innocent Iraqis. Why? How? They follow “the orders”; and that’s all it takes for a person to become the most cruel criminal.

Oh, no. he has done it again. He has gotten a detention for the second time. Why? It’s because he has done the serious crime: speaking his words in Korean at the school.
Walking up the stairs with my friend, talking about a foreign drama that we were watching all night, I got too excited and spoke in the forbidden language. “Maja, Maja! (??, ??!)” I said, and before I even move on to the next word, I felt someone tapping my shoulder. I looked back. A teacher (whom I never have seen before) was displaying a big evil smile on her face. She asked for my name; therefore I answered, and she wrote it down on her yellow folder, the list of criminals.
I, as a citizen of Republic of Korea, have the freedom of speech, the liberty of expression. However my personal rights and freedom had been trespassed by the school policy. No-Korean-speaking-at-school-policy shows no respect not only towards the Korean language itself, yet towards the students who owns preserved rights.
The major reason for establishing this no-Korean-speaking-rule is to encourage students to speak English so that they can prepare for their school years in American universities. However, as high school students we are capable of preparing our own future and managing our own behaviors. Those who don’t act maturely without thinking deeply will face failure in the future. Tough, but that’s real world where one should be responsible for oneself. Although guiding its students by using certain rules is one of the roles of school, imagining students’ rights cannot be considered as guiding, but controlling the students using authorities.

“I just want to live. I don’t care how,” Lincoln Six-Echo says.
“You’re not real. You’re copies of people out here in the world,” people reply.
The movie, The Island, impressed me.

Having no ceiling to limit it down, technology has continued its growth and development since its first arrival. Nowadays technology has even started to intrude the divine right of nature: People have begun to desire the creation of life. Human cloning is the ultimate destination they hope to arrive at. “To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number,” Neil Postman argues in Technopoly. If a man develops a new technology that can invent human beings, humans will begin to be seen as objects. Human cloning must never happen.
No shortcut existed in the past. One by one, word for word, people had to copy out a written document with their hands to create its replica. Pouring significant amounts of time and labor, each transcription was treated with great values in return. However, starting with the engraving block technique of Egyptian, humans developed printing technologies, such as Gutenberg’s Printing Press. Finally the development reached its destination where pressing a button using one finger is the only task required to create words and texts. No more admiration is aroused for a written edition due to its commonness. If developments in cloning humans take place, it will result in a similar sequence with insignificance and cheapness of human life.
Cloned humans would be nothing different from other people except for the fact that they are born without chronic pains of mothers. Some people claim that human-cloning should be allowed for medical usage, such as creating organs for transplant. All human beings are born or created holding natural rights that follow the privilege of living as humans. A person should never be allowed to decide the purpose of another person’s life. It is a trespass against a person’s civil liberties to create the person for certain purposes, but cloning could easily lead to this. “You’re special. You have a very special purpose in life,” says the God-like man to the clones in the movie, The Island. The clones’ “very special purpose” is to devote themselves to serve their owners by providing organs: They die for their identical being regardless of their will. Although this has not taken place in reality, it is very likely what the situation will look like if cloning becomes possible.
Another possible problem with cloning is that with emergence of identical beings, society may be situated in chaos. Loss of uniqueness will occur, and the concept of individuality will be gradually but surely be lost as well. When border lines among these individuals fade away, the whole society will sink below the manageable surface. No human is perfect; therefore potential human errors take a big role in resisting the allowance of human cloning. The possibility of a cloned human being deformed and disabled cannot be ignored. There is a case in which Dr. Wilmut of Roslin Institute of England conducted the birth of a clone sheep in 1996. At first, the experiment seemed successful; the sheep, Dolly, was healthy, and was praised as the very first mammal created by men’s hand. However, side effects began to rise up on the surface. Its abnormal speed in aging led to serious lung disease, and it had to be euthanatized. As a result, it barely complete half of normal sheep’s lifetime. This may happen during human cloning process; in that particular case, no payment can pay the price of it.
Human dignity will crash down with demise of individualism among people. Life of a person will be treated as if it is accessible effortlessly. Eventually, the existence of a human will be considered easy and cheap as a paper copy of a document. Humans are not papers. Humans are not documents that can be copied whenever they are needed.
Human cloning is the box of Pandora. It is the Eden’s apple. Once we open the box and eat the forbidden fruit, our entire species will suffer. Euthanizing a person is more serious undertaking than euthanizing a sheep. Are we ready to deal with the moral question involved?

Neither a person nor an accident gave me a serious physical-injury. Again, no “physical”-injury. Yet I once received a severe mental-wound by a keen blade of words. The sharp edge came out from my best friends’ mouths and hacked me into pieces.

I had attended a small middle school with little number of students in each grade. Being in a group was everything and staying next to friends was so crucial. For sure, I had belonged to the group in which each of us was too afraid to be independent. One day, unexpectedly I heard two of my best friends disparaging me—they didn’t notice that I was hearing their conversation. Cursing and swearing, they were talking about my rumors that made nonsense. I felt ridiculous about their stupidity—how could they not think of me hearing their conversation by any chance?

I never told them that I heard the conversation. Although they didn’t show me any negative attitude toward me directly, I still felt dreg of anger from their betrayal. I stopped myself placing myself between them. At first, I was extremely angry at them. However the feeling slowly transformed and became an intense grief. I had put faith in them, but they betrayed my trust. As a young naïve girl, I felt my heart getting torn down. I cried so much and I felt an extreme “loneliness”. I was afraid to feel that.

“Loneliness”—people seem to be afraid to possess such feeling. We all do. We all try to fit ourselves in a safe zone—a boring safe zone where we can loose our peculiarity, characteristics, and identity in order to blend with others.

The term “loneliness” does not mean something negative to me anymore. The time of being lonely was time for me to learn how to stand up independently.

I had lost two friends yet earned myself—what a happy ending.

A woman blubbers with immense amount of teardrops trickling down her cheeks. Then, I start crying as well. If she falls in love in an attractive young man, then I love also begin to love him. The woman is me; and I am the woman for about two hours. She is on the screen while I am sitting down on a red-colored chair.

Despite all the differences we have, I become the actress. To be more precise, I become the character while watching a movie. I am not a blonde like the beautiful lady on the screen. I have neither large eyes nor handsome nose as those of hers. However two of us are together since the beginning of the movie, and I see all the happenings from the character’s lenses. I face utterly new experiences by not only looking at the screen, but actually become part of the whole film.

To make me happy, not many things are required. A large bag of popcorn in my left hand with a cup of light-coke in the other hand, a huge screen with advanced audio system in front of me, and couple of friends sitting next to me—these are all I need to transform myself as a totally different person seeking for a brand new world that I have never faced before. A cinema is nothing else but a heaven. I see, feel, and become the film itself—it is how I enjoy watching movies.

Some people say the world is corrupted, full of evil, depraved. However the warmth, or the humanity, still continues its powerful heartbeat in this harsh, cold world. Recently, I was impressed by certain people’s love and their strength.

I volunteered my services for an international organization—helping people in foreign land such as Africa—named “World Vision”. The organization’s main role was to assign each Korean sponsor a foreign child who needs financial help. Then the sponsors supported their assigned children financially and developed relationship with the children by exchanging letters. My job there was to translate the letters written in Korean by sponsors into English or the other way around—translating English letters into Korean. Last Monday was the first day for me to go into the office and actually perform my duty. My task was quite simple; yet it was not a trifling job at all.

There was total number of fifteen thousand people in Seoul sponsoring the poor kids. I was astonished by its fairly big number; however this number, although surprising, was not the thing that made me feel the warmness with my heart. There was one letter written by a sponsor with relatively long length and a piece of yellow Post-it on the top. At first I was busy, translating the letter into English; therefore I did not really pay attention to the Post-it. The content of letter was not so unique or different from other letters, including the three common substances that all the other letters included: complimentary comments about the kid’s cute appearance (I guess all the children have sent their own pictures), questions asking for the child’s health, and an apology for writing back so late. As I finished the translation, I looked at the Post-it unconsciously, read the notes, and couldn’t stop myself from being extremely emotional. What that small note saying was very touching. It said that the one who wrote this letter is not an actual sponsor, yet a new owner of the house where the real sponsor was living it. The sponsor had moved out; however the new owner had no way to contact him. Therefore, she, an ahjuma who wrote the letter and the note, received the letter written by 8-year-old African kid instead of the original sponsor. After reading the letter and looking the child’s picture, she felt something deep inside her heart. Then she decided to become a new sponsor for the kid, replacing the original one’s spot.

What a beautiful world it is. How beautiful the people we live with are. She did not pay a significant amount of money. Most of the sponsors, according to the letters, are not very wealthy. Yet they are taking care of the ones who are given less privilege than them, providing the poor kids with financial help with their best. These people do have warm hearts, they do appreciate what they are given, and they are the true happy ones, I thought.

Who are you? No, I am not asking for your name. I asked who you are, not what your name is. Why are you here? Why are you born? Why are you sitting down in front of this computer looking at the screen displaying my post?

I bet that you couldn’t give a clear, true answer to these consecutive questions starting with a word which makes everything so complicated: why. Certain things have reasons for its existences. A clock is there to tell people time, a pencil is used to write things on papers; a phone, to communicate. However these are things that are made by people to perform specific roles. Clear reasons have not been defined for existence of things in nature: the sun, the earth, the animals, and humans. Scientists have been trying to determine how the whole universe is formed at the first place. Some people eased themselves from this problem by simply assuming that there is higher force above them: gods (wait, then, where did the gods come from?).

I have no idea about the whole universe, yet I thought of the one reason for the existence of human being. A human is born to find out why he or she is born. As the time flows, a person handles many different tasks with various goals. Equal chance of experimenting with ones own life is given out to everyone. Live your life considering it as an opportunity to realize why you are living.

With a romantic melody flowing, two half naked boys, full of passion, were holding each other. Sweat covered all of their bodies; gasping for breath, the two seemed inseparable. What are they doing? I asked myself, and the only answer I could think of was them making love. The very instant when I assumed them as homosexuals, a man who were watching the scene removed his headphone. The amorous song ended, and no more romance existed. Instead, loud cheers of a crowd filled up the speaker. An utterly different angle provided an unexpected image. No, they were not making love. They were two wrestlers struggling to defeat each other.
The situation was created by the company trying to sell their new mobile phone with an mp3 function. “Our company makes a cellular phone with great music which can change your way of viewing things” is the basic message that the advertisement delivers. Yet what penetrated my mind was not the fresh machine’s arrival. The advertisement itself with its astonishing way of destroying the viewers’ stereotyped image felt fresh. Breaking stubborn stereotypes hindering people from facing the truths that they are suppose to see—this is what I want to do. I want to become a thinker, speaker, writer, viewer who can remove colored glasses placed in front of eyes of people.
I want to be a person who is capable of showing the same image from an opposite angle and still convince the audience. The commercial with two naked boys which is supposed to be funny and humorous altered my life. Obtaining ultimate purpose of life from a laughable advertisement: isn’t this happening itself smashing the stereotype?

The car chooses its driver, and the story begins. The movie Transformer illustrates the visit of robots from outer space to our planet, earth. The robots are capable of “transforming” themselves into cars or other machineries. Throughout the plot, they not only transform their outer shape, yet also alter a boy’s life and destiny of humanity. Despite its wonderful imagination, breathtaking action scenes, and entertaining plot, the heaviest theme that the movie handles is the role of government and its current situation in the United States: how it has transformed itself compared to its beginning and how it should transform for the future.

Based on certain scenes, authorities in the movie often appear rather abusive toward citizens, the ordinary people. A police officer who captures the main character, Sam, in the beginning, does not even try to listen to the innocent boy’s explanation of what has actually taken place. The policeman presumes that Sam is on drugs due to his desperate descriptions about his new car transforming into a robot, then forces him to confess so. Policemen are the ones who should pay attention to the voice of citizens, protect them from any danger, and hold their hands when needed. They are the emblem of justice, yet their actions shown in the scene are absolutely unjust and unfair. This scene clearly points out the corruption existing in the present police force. It is true that the number of incidents where police officers misuse their power upon people.

Another negative aspect that the movie revealed about the current foreign policy of US is its warlike characteristic. Without any definite evidence, the Secretary of Defense assumes its opposing country, Russia or North Korea, as the attacker who has destroyed their army base at desert and as the penetrator into US supercomputer. This behavior of the United States expressed in the film directly censures its ongoing war with Iraq. George W. Bush had claimed that his reason of invading and sending young American soldiers to Iraq was to confiscate weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein. However the reality was different. Iraq had no such weapons that would threat the world. Moreover, the setting in desert presented in movie where the battle occurred tries to remind the audience of how their invaluable young generation is being lost.

Despite its corruption, the government in the movie brings itself a huge change when the safety of its citizens is threatened under attacks of the Decepticons. The high officials start to listen to the voice of the young boy. They cooperate with the Autobots admitting their previous mistakes and successfully defeat their common enemy. Through their actions, the movie directly suggests that a hope still exists for American government. The ultimate peace will arise on the surface if only the government plays its true role taking care of each member of their community and merging with other cultures, represented by the Authobots in the movie.

Even though Transformer is supposed to be entertaining, it certainly depicts deeper theme beyond being just a fun movie to watch over the summer. The United States began its history under a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Unfortunately its dignity recently has been transformed; and it needs to be transformed again into a different, hopefully a finer, form.

The origin of ones life itself has no cause, I believe. What I mean by a “cause” is an actual cause of life, not a cause of pregnancy (which is a simple mating).
No one earned their life. An opportunity to see the light of this universe is not a granted matter that a person deserves; it is something that is already given to a person without his or her will. Whether the one desired for it or not, he or she still has to pay the cost of receiving the chance by living given life. As humans carry on their burden of existence, they eventually face absurdity of life and realize lightness of their subsistence.
Why was I born? What am I breathing for? Although no one can answer them, by nature, to bear the lightness of ones being, humans unceasingly struggle to place themselves in a position where they can defend reasons for their existences. I, as a member of the species, constantly try to justify that I am worthy living. Yet life provides no ceiling to touch. We push ourselves up the endless stairs called greed toward the terminus named final achievement of aim, when actually no terminus point exists in life. Study to get all A’s, go to Harvard, graduate with GPA of 4.0, struggle and compete with others to get a job you want, work hard for higher annual income, work harder and harder, then maybe after 10 extra years of working, try asking yourself a question: “Wait, so why am I working so hard?”
Why do you study, work, and live? If my heartbeat stops right now, nothing actually changes. Yes, my mom will cry and my class will have one student missing in the room. But so what? My death won’t even tickle the universe. The earth will still rotate, the sun will still rise, and others will still continue breathing. How light and trivial I am.
Seeking for a meaning and loading weight on what I consider important in life neither offer a reason of my life nor cancel the encounter with the unbearable lightness of being. Instead, too much burden on shoulders would suppress me down, placing my soul in the bottom floor of the stairs and making myself suffer bitter reality of emptiness.
Despite its lightness and absurdity, my life is full of meaning. Being able to breathe in this universe itself is a privilege; being no other one on earth, but being me who is unique from all the others is a special gift. The opportunity of being able to continue the heartbeats constantly transmit unlimited chances to struggle to find meaning in my life. Living in this universe is a worthwhile attempt.