“It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and only seconds to destroy it.”

Despite the discombobulating of values most adolescents possess in our society today, people in the past seemed to hold reputations in even greater esteem. In The Crucible, even a sensible man like John Proctor prized reputation to the extreme. Within the last act, John Procter signs a document confessing his dealings with the devil to ultimately secure his existence. Following constant pleading and a refusal to keep his confession private, John Proctor tears the document and guarantees his death. Evidently, reputation was worth dying for.

Now high school does not rate reputation on such a significant level, but you’d be surprised. Rumors are still spread and rash judgments are made, but I have never heard of anyone dying to maintain their reputation…yet. I took this quiz supposedly determining my reputation. It came to the conclusion that I was a “serious slacker.” No one has ever told me that, and what does a computer know? How can a computer know a person solely on the way they dress or who they hang out with? Computers are incapable of that, just as humans are.

MARTHA COREY’S VOICE: I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is.
HAWTHORE’S VOICE: How do you know, then, that you are not a witch?
-Arthur Miller

A legal system giving people like Martha Corey the label “guilty,” or at least until proven innocent is nonsensical, considering the quandary of attesting that a women is a witch. With a little research, I found evidence to support the irrationality of the legal system in 1692, during the witch trials. People reasoned that if the accused woman could float in the water, she was a witch; if she did not die from drowning, she’d die by hanging as one. If she sank, the woman was innocent of the accusation; but what good is it if she’s dead? Another test entails burning the woman’s hand in a boiling pot, if it did not heal in four days she was a witch. The woman’s failure to heal supposedly signified the Devil’s hand at work and an absence of God’s presence within her. People were pressed as well. The book goes in depth about pressing in the conversation between Elizabeth and John Proctor about Giles Corey’s death. These tests were not only unfounded, but unfair as well. Guiltless women were subjected to needless pain and devastating deaths. Despite the government’s attempt to compensate for the suffering people endured because of the witch trials, no sum of money or pity could undo the physical and emotional damage caused in Salem.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
-Thomas Jefferson

Well, obviously that is one think Salem lacked. Oh and don’t forget, that and sensible reasoning.

It’s about the Salem Witch Trials.It’s really nothing new with all the movies and lessons about it covered in elementary school. Even an episode of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” is related to the same topic. Libby claims Sabrina’s friend is a witch, which is ironic. It’s all the same, senseless girls making up lies to simply get themselves out of trouble. The people around them lack logic as well. They believe anything they are told. Personally, the most frustrating aspect of the Crucible was that despite the irrationality of the girl’s lies, everyone else was falling for it. John F. Kennedy said “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”