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November, 2004
Megan Crain
Tower of London
This place makes me sick. So much haunting history. Screaming shadows seem to leap out at me from the stone and cement. “Tower” seems to be an appropriate name since the burden of what this site stands for towers over me and takes me far from my comfort zone. I find it so very disgusting that animals from the same species as I could do things like this to each other. As I walked through the torture chamber and learned of the many ways people were brutally murdered for crimes that could have been insignificant, I thought to myself, “Who thought one day—‘I’d like to bind someone at both hands and feet and slowly pull apart their body. Or… maybe I should put them in a device that slowly crunches their body into a ball until they die…Ah, well. Whichever! As long as it takes at least an hour.” What a sicko! This person must have been seriously offended. Were they a scorned lover? Were
they cheated at poker? Or was it brutal abuse as a child? Either way, much thought went in to these forms of torture and it sent more than one chill down my spine to know it happened in a culture I am told I descended from (despite my curiously Irish features).
Trying to deal with my atmosphere-induced depression as best I could I shared my friend’s sentiment, “All this just makes me glad that this will never happen to me”. But this remark hung around my head for a while. Is there really a guarantee that this could never happen to me? Surely I wasn’t the only one that could make the connection between these horrifying acts and those committed in my own century in the Holocaust. Granted, Hitler’s motive was mass genocide and that couldn’t possibly be what was going on at the Tower of London…or could it? Is the horror of the Tower of London so much less than that of the public beheadings or hand-choppings or rapes and slaughters of innocents in Afghanistan? In both cases,
the higher power is abusing its right to keep the “little people” or
any people that get in the way under control. The higher power was allowed too much power and, with the help of a couple of real sickos, got out of control. Could this not, in a way, be a form of genocide of the commoners of a society? And is it so impossible that it could happen again? Or, a question that I think might rub a little closer, is it so impossible that it might happen to “us”?
In any system, (government, work-force, education, etc.) too much power for one party is going to be bad news. The funny thing about power is that is doesn’t share. I was lucky enough to have been born into a free society where my vote makes a difference. By “vote”, I don’t necessarily mean by ballot. But by every personal choice I make, I decide to whom I am lending power. Where I go to school, what products I support with my purchase, and what influence I decide to have on those I know might look to me for guidance. With all of these freedoms, I decide who or what controls me. In grade school,
I was told that we study history to learn from it so that we can progress on the good things and not let the bad things repeat themselves. My trip to the Tower of London helped me to remember this and to remember that my choices will decide if all of this could ever happen to me. So, is the moral of the story: Think twice before you cheat at the poker table? Or is it that your actions, your choices, and your votes will determine where the power is and whether or not history will repeat itself? You decide.
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