Christopher Bigsby Writing Assignment
#1
“Miller is concerned with the breaking of the social contract that binds a community together, as love and mutual respect binds individuals” “breaking of charity with one another” xv. When I was nine years old my parents would no longer let me see my grandma Anne from my dad’s side, because she was an alcoholic. She was always drinking and it got to the point that when she would come over to our house my parents would have to go hide all the alcohol. Sadly my grandma Anne passed away a few years later of kidney failure ultimately because of the drinking. I never got to see her before she passed, but I remember the way her hands felt like silk when I would hold them and she smelt like freshly cut flowers on a rainy day.
#2
“Study of the debilitating power of guilt, the seduction of power, the flawed nature of the individual and of the society to which the individual owes allegiance” xxiv
David Hunson was seventeen attending West Albany High School when he went to a party and drank too much. Hunson had given Sarah Foster also seventeen a ride home from the party, when Hunson crashed his truck into a tree, killing Foster and only slightly hurting Hunson. The guilt that Hunson felt was so overwhelming and unbearable that a year later he ended up committing suicide.
#3
“To deflect punishment from themselves they accused others, and those who listened, themselves insecure their authority, acquiesced, partly because it served their interests to do so and partly because they inhabited a world in which witchcraft formed a part of their cosmology.” vii and viii When I would get into trouble I would sometimes bring up something my sister Melissa had done in order to get out of trouble. For example, when I was fourteen years old I got into trouble for not being home at ten pm. So when my parents came to talk to me the next morning, I started to tell them that my sister Melissa who was twelve had snuck out that night and she never got in trouble. When my parents heard of what my sister had done they were very mad at both of us, and we both got grounded for a week.