Lesson #9

I think that living in Troy a lot of people (including myself) tend to forget how lucky we are. Living in a place that has low crime rates, minimal poverty, and a good school system is something we tend to over look on a day to day basis. I think a lot of us at Troy high focus on the negatives instead of the positives; we think about how much homework we get, or how difficult our classes are, rather than how prepared we will be for college, or how well known our school is for its education.

I think in life as much as we don't want to admit it, we all tend to think of ourselves as the victims, or the disadvantaged. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had" (Fitzgerald 5). I think this quote should make us look at our view of not only ourselves, but the rest of the world. The way I think of it is on a worldly scale. In Troy High we tend to complain about how hard our education is; yet I have friends at Athens that complain that their teachers don't even bother teaching them the material. What they don't realize is that their are kids in Detroit who barely have classrooms for schools and have minimal education; the kids in Detroit don't realized that there are people in impoverished countries who don't even have the option to go to school. I think we only tend to compare the things we see as negatives or disadvantages, instead of all the things we are blessed to have. 

I like to think that the best possible example would be the government. As we all know, people in the US love to complain about our government. We talk only about the corruption or what we feel the injustices are. Yet we fail to see how blessed we all are for living in a country that is free and gives us the ability to do things such as criticize the government. In China the government runs the country, they do not have the freedoms that we have to speak our minds. I personally could never imagine living without the freedoms that I have and I think that is something that many Americans overlook. In other countries people are killed for opposing the government and are given no freedoms at all. I think this is a problem with criticism. We not only criticize others for their disadvantages, but we overlook our own advantages. We look at everybody like they come from the same situation as us, because we don't know any situation other than our own. I think that criticism comes naturally to humans because it is hard to be open minded about situations we know nothing about. But I think that if we look harder at what we are judging people for, we might judge others a little less.

Lesson #9: Judgments are based on limited thinking.