In this project, we looked at many cases of revenge and forgiveness to create an argument that would represent our views on the subject. To began this project, we looked at a lot of Shakespeare such as The Tempest which contains a lot of revenge as well as forgiveness. This play was about a magician named Prospero who was banished to an island with his five year old daughter by his brother and and other nobles. Twelve years later, the very same men who imprisoned Prospero onto this island had sailed close enough to the island for Propsero to use his magic and land them in a shipwreck on the island. Then the question arose, should Prospero forgive them, or should he torture them and take his revenge? Next we looked at various articles about revenge and forgiveness. The first article that we looked at was the Dachau Reprisals where an army of US forces gunned down over 500 Nazi concentration camp guards because they had found about 25 boxcars that were filled with 2,310 decomposing corpses. The second article was about LA riots which our group classified as an act of revenge that only resulted in looting, 53 deaths, 2,300 injuries, and about $1 billion in property damage. The last article that we used as evidence was about Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel. Mary Johnson's son 20 year old son named Laramiun Byrd was shot to death by Oshea Israel at a party in 1993. 12 years later she visited Oshea in prison and verbally told him that although her words would not condone what he did 20 years ago, she did forgive him. Now, Mary is like a second mother to him and they share their story about forgiveness to people through their organization called "From Death to Life". I would have to say that my favorite part of this project was just reading about these events and having silent conversations on the poster papers. I wasn't at all prepared for that and at the time I wasn't sure how to get my thoughts out without verbally speaking to someone instead so it did actually make me a little nervous to try that out. But, when I did get the hang of it I thought about how my words looked more prepared when I had to think about it and then write down my response. I also didn't realize how much I enjoyed reading other people's opinions and being able to respond to them on paper because I really got to read through their words and understand how they thinking in that exercise.
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