Antigone

Reading Response for Antigone Power is a tricky entitlement to decide among a community. Some people may believe that the ruler has the best decision in mind for everyone in that specific community, and other people may believe otherwise. My personal opinion on how much power a ruler should have is sort of a complicated opinion in that I do not believe in one specific ruler to make decisions for a whole community. Rulers should not have any significant power than anyone else because it should be a unanimous decision involved with each member of a community. Pertaining to Antigone, I believe that it should have been a group of people or the community’s decision to condemn Antigone rather than one personal decision from Creon because of personal spite with the family. Antigone without a doubt disobeyed Creon’s order about Polyneikes’ burial, but she was also doing justice for Polyneikes and her family. She hopes that her death will bring happiness to her mother and father, and her brothers as well and states, “because I honored your corpse, Polyneikes, this is how I’m repaid? I honored you as a wise men would think right” (Sophocles, 994). Antigone is essentially expressing that a wise man would understand that he was not a traitor, and that Creon is absolutely wrong about his assumption. Even Creon’s own son and wife stand up for Antigone’s decision to die for the justice of her brother, and they too die. All these examples just go to show that one ruler should not make all the decisions regarding what is best for a community, because other people have opinions and even evidence in some cases to prove why the rulers view may be wrong.
I believe that in some aspects, individual’s rights should be valued more than the governments. For instance, gay marriage today is illegal in a majority of the states in the US. In this case, I think the individual’s rights should be valued more than the opinion of the government because it has to do with the personal preference