Death from a hollow point of view | Teen Ink

Death from a hollow point of view

May 3, 2013
By John Cox BRONZE, Round Lake, Illinois
John Cox BRONZE, Round Lake, Illinois
2 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Death from a hollow point of view
Some people say that everyone is born good at heart the sad reality of that is that it is all very true. The problem we face in today’s society and in all societies that came before us is what these children who are born good are exposed to. When I was little I met a little boy who was Mexican he was a very polite and nice kid, but I knew that his mom was abusive towards him. However also being a child I could do nothing to help him with this. After many years of not talking to him I finally met him again and this boy had become a gang member who was headed towards a very dark future. I believe that this boy who was somewhere still inside of him had been concealed by what he was exposed to with where he went to school and how he was treated by his parents, while his father was gone his mother was an abusive alcoholic. I do believe that all humans are born good at heart but not all humans remain good people and this may not be their fault.

People will give examples of humans who have performed horrible actions towards society such as Hitler in this story and how he was killing 6 million people. You may say that Hitler could have never dealt with something that would turn him into a person who would kill this many people but you would be surprised the effect that something’s can have on people. Hitler had a large family living in a small house and this incoherently angered his father his older half-brother being Alois Jr. caught the brunt of his father’s anger and suffered harsh words frequently and occasional thrash outs from his father. However when Alois Jr. turned the age of 14 he ran away from home leaving Hitler at age 7 to take his place as the outlet for his fathers’ rage. Hitler was part of a family that constantly moved from place to place and when his father passed away was when the bad took a turn for the worse he began to see no point in school and dropped out at age 16. Hitler soon took up an interest in politics and many of the politicians that he was exposed to were Anti-Semitists who hated Jews, while Hitler was not initially racist against Jews and had some Jewish friends he was beginning to soak up the hateful messages that were emanated from these leaders. This man was not simply born to be a hateful person who wanted to exterminate an entire race from existence he was born an ordinary person that was exposed to plenty of horrible events. This is was truly led him to become the person who single handedly built and army of people who were enslaved by his words and began to systematically destroy a race of human beings.

Throughout history there has been people who were good and bad on a drastic scale from John D. Rockefeller who was one of the world’s richest men to ever live and also become one of the greatest philanthropists the world has ever known to Osama Bin Laden a terrorist ring leader who was able to cause sheer horror in the United States for years. John D. Rockefeller was a perfect example of a person who went from a horrible man that caused much grief in the United States to a man who fixed the problem of poverty and helped to bring us back from a nationwide down fall in the economy. He was a man who ran the largest monopoly in the United States possible ever on oil and made more money than most of our nation combined at the time by himself. When he was in his old age to redeem himself for his actions against America, whether it was for the acceptance from the people of the U.S. or out of the good of his heart he gave back much of this money to fix the problems that we were facing at the time. There was also a case of this in the novel The Book Thief, which was a much smaller deal but still the same ordeal. The wife of the mayor of Molching had this same problem she was originally a good person who only brought happiness to Liesel when she would allow her to read books in her huge library, but when times became tight she was one person who would have been able to keep the laundry service that the Hubermanns offered to help their family out. Considering they live in a mansion they gave an awful reason behind not being able to they simply “wouldn’t want to keep luxuries that others can’t have during times like these”. This is an example of a person who was goodhearted but performed a bad deed not due to her hate for someone else, but because she simply couldn’t provide for Liesels’ family by using the Hubermanns laundry service.

Even though there has been plenty of horrible people throughout history there has never been proof that this was due to something triggered at birth. There is constant study of a babies brain in fact in my class we read an article about a doctor who studies babies brains through a machine he created and it was said that through his machine. This machine was designed to measure baby’s brain wave lengths and see how active their brain really is when they’re born and what exactly they think about as infants. The doctor found out that babies actually don’t develop a personality until the age when they can create a memory and sensory of the objects they see, which is at the age of 2. This has been scientifically proven that it is actually impossible to be born a bad person, but then again this does not mean they are born a good person either. All people are born as a neutral person and become who they are through what happens to them in their early childhood from about the age of 2-7 and sometimes beyond that. Liesel at the age of thirteen saw her brother die on a train and be buried by two men with no proper burial. This moment was a traumatic time in her life in which she also lost her mother because her mother had to give Liesel up for the good of Liesels’ health. After all these horrible moments in Liesel’s life she did not turn to violence and evil because she couldn’t handle what happened to her instead she became an even more kind person; who cared more about others than she did before. This also proves that not everyone who suffers from a traumatic moment becomes a bad person, but instead become a person who helps others.

This problem we have developed in society in which people and parents constantly create horrible people due to the trauma their children are facing has created an even worse environment for other people’s children that weren’t yet contaminated with the problem of violence and vile hatred. These kids that are abused and beaten to their limits are the children that become the true killers of our society whether they wield the knife like Jack the Ripper or they wield the people that perform the deeds such as Hitler they all lead to the same path of death. These children were not always bad people, but they have become bad people through the torture they experienced in their childhood. My point in this essay is to say that everyone is born a neutral person and it is up to you to make sure that people do not become what Hitler became or any of the hundreds of serial killers that exist and have existed in our world. I want you to become the person who keeps their kids and others kids safe from the darkness of a bad future of death.


The author's comments:
This piece was inspired by the story of an old friend who had gone through a rough time and we are no longer friends this is in his honor.

Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.