In the poem “Tiananmen Square,1989” Marisa Lin talks about her father and his bravery back in 1989 during the Tiananmen massacre. Lin talks about how she found a picture of a man that looked like her father who was marching in the protest and wanted a better understanding of her family’s relationship with collective resistance. Throughout the poem, Lin mentions how the massacre was very deadly and challenging: “ or simply bullets slicing the square, shouts and fears running and running into bodies.” This reflects back to how her father and other students feared for their lives.
Lin talks about her father showing his bravery against the military and how he had the courage to walk down the dusty pavement of a multilane highway.
... resisting
the fist of a government crushing ambitions
into pennies,
while a single protester, white
shirt tucked in like my father
wears to church, stands
before a tank
the way one stands
before god:
where it moves, he moves.
where he stands, it stops.
These stanzas and lines represent the importance of bravery and how it takes courage to stand up against those who think less of others. The first lines of my evidence talk about resisting the fist of the government, which means a form of resistance against the government. The part about standing before a tank is emphasizing that someone feels scared or brave towards the tank, just like how some people feel about God when thinking about him if they were to face him, and also how it was just one protester that was brave enough to do this to save his peers. The final lines of this evidence prove that the father was very brave and that he followed every move the tank made without any hesitation.
In Antigone there is a part of scene 2 where Antigone stands up against Creon for the blaming of the man, and Antigone denies nothing but also stands up against what she thinks is right. Creon questions Antigone about the burying and tells her that “you dared defy the law,” and Antigone’s response is what shows the true meaning of bravery and integrity: “That final justice—that rules the world below makes no such laws.” This goes to show that Antigone is acting upon what she believes is right instead of denying and letting Creon have the benefit of the doubt. Antigone’s interaction with Creon is a form of bravery and integrity because after Antigone's acceptance of her action, she mentions how she knows she must die, which means that Antigone does not regret what she did because she knows it was an act of bravery and the right thing to do.
One way I can connect this back to my personal life is by comparing it to a time when I had to take accountability and be brave and stand up for what’s right. I stood up to a bigger person than me back when I was little. This took a lot of courage from me because I knew he was bigger, but I also knew what was right, so I decided to take my chances and do the right thing, which turned out to be right because action was taken and the student was stopped.
I connect this to the real world because every day there are many people who do the wrong thing, but there’s always that one person who takes an act of bravery and either points it out to the authorities or takes care of it themselves. For example, in the blog titled “This Hero Rescued 150 Girls From FGM,” Issac Ogila reports that 6 years ago, a woman by the name of Florence Lomariwo was a woman from Kenya who sought education and knew the importance of education. Florence grew up in a family where her father had many women in his life and a lot of children, and out of those children, Florence was the one who was determined to change it all.
She grew up in a family where she wasn’t allowed to go to school or have the partner of her choice and was told she needed to be married at an early age, which those same rules applied to a lot of young women in Kenya. After a couple of years, Florence realized that she had to make a difference and stand up for what was right and decided to forget and put the rules in the past and do what she knew was right. Florence was determined and went on to study education and became a teacher and even married the man of her choice. She also now runs a school and rescue center for girls who escaped FGM and early marriage.
Bravery is a strong word that can mean a lot of different things, but more importantly, it can leado a lot of different things. My inspiration comes from a time when I had to show an act of bravery against someone I supposedly needed to respect. Back in elementary school, my teacher was disrespecting me and my classmates in ways that made some students feel uncomfortable and unsafe. This teacher would call me and my classmates names and would even throw things around in class sometimes. One day I walked into class, and this teacher already had a mood, which I knew meant that class wasn’t going to go well. She yelled at me for some reason, and I told myself I needed to stand up for myself, which I did. I decided to get up and confront her about being disrespectful towards me and my classmates. I was brave enough to tell her that she needed to stop this and that I was going to communicate with the principal about this because it had been going on for too long. It took a lot of courage for me to do this because every other student was scared of her since she’d threaten to call parents if anyone tried to talk back.