My Ethical Lens

If only it was easy enough to determine which is the right way to find the right ethical path as it is cleaning a mirror. Throughout life, we are constantly making decisions about everything. The decisions we make can be rooted from the values we hold dear to ourselves. Not only does our conscience enable us to think about our decisions, but ethics brings our thoughts to life and influences our behaviors. Therefore, ethics is said to be the set of glasses through which you view the world. This is essential because your view of the world impacts the way you conduct yourself. There is no Windex Glass Cleaner to assist you when trying to form your ethical lenses. Christian ethics assists us in living our lives in a way which we are able to obtain
Besides daily pressure of societal acceptance, teenagers, especially depending on your background, go through endless types of temptations and false hopes on their journey to find happiness. My journey to find happiness seems endless and sometimes hopeless. I understand that striving to find happiness in artificial ways will get me nowhere, but a quick fix satisfies me for a little while until I end up back in the same desolate place. My ethical lenses were created and amended through my diverse background and all the things I have witnessed during my 16 years of life. My first pair of glasses was handed to me after the childhood innocence I had was stripped of me. I witnessed something which opened my eyes to the consequences of wrong decisions and forced me to take control and responsibility over every action I proceeded to do after that. This new addition of ethical lenses allowed me to mature faster than others may have, but shaped me into the young woman I am today. The various messages of which I have to determine which will lead me in the right direction, confuses me.
One of the figures whom resonated with me the most was Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates’ ethical lenses have been shaped by his experience growing up in Baltimore. Coates lived in constant fear which impacted the way he viewed everything around him. His fear was not changed until he attended Howard University, where he gained knowledge. If Ta-Nehisi Coates was to pull me aside and speak to me about my ethical lenses, his reaction would likely be empathetic, considering that we both come from similar backgrounds and grew up with similar ideas of how the world around us operates. He would begin to speak to me, as he did his son in Between the World and Me, and say, “I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.”(Coates 126) He would agree with how it is hard to distinguish the path of happiness with destruction surrounding