Many people in Taiwan believe that eating dog meat or bear palms could
bring benefits to their health. Due to this wrong idea, dogs are killed
for their meat and bears are 「murdered」 for their palms. People kill
animals without any mercy at all! Cruelties like this happen in our
daily life all the time, but no one is taking any actions against these
cruelties because people often take these kinds of cruelties lightly.
Reading from the lines of Shirley Jackson』s 「The Lottery」, we can see
that it showed a cruelty in life that people take lightly. The story is
set in a small village with a weird tradition: to pick out someone and
stone the person to death in order to have a good harvest. The
villagers in the story stoned one of the villagers among them to death
and family members also participated in that ceremony; ironically, the
villagers even seemed to be jovial during the ridiculous ritual. To
them, the ritual was a common and normal thing that even children were
allowed to attend. They didn』t think it was a cruelty. This is also
what we modern people are like nowadays---we often take many cruelties
in real-life lightly.
When I was in senior high school, I had many friends and classmates
around me who had already had quite a few abortions simply because they
consider making preparation before having sex a bothersome thing.
Therefore, they』d rather have abortions and destroy lives than making
preparations in advance. This shows that teens and the younger
generations have begun to see these operations as ordinary things in
life. They don』t think there』s anything unusual about them.
When people begin to take life lightly, as demonstrated by my friends in
high school and the villagers in 「The Lottery,」 this is a very serious
problem. We should try to make people understand the importance of
every individual person and make them realize that life itself is a
precious thing which shouldn』t be ignored in any way by anyone.