Doctah Jekyll and Meestah Hyde

                Today, Kennedy High School put on a musical about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of those traditional boring books that you would complain about in a traditional classroom setting, but a really interesting plotline if you want to see or read it. Now, I know that there are probably parts in the musical that are not in the book and parts in the book that are not in the musical, but I am sure that the general idea about the science is the same. I was thinking about Jekyll’s thought process about how all evil must be eliminated from the world, and I am pretty sure everyone agrees with this. The problem is, who defines what is good and what is evil.

                In a manga that I once read, called Death Note, it steps on this idea of differentiating between good and evil. For a quick summary, it is about a model teenage student who obtains a book that is able to kill people, and he uses it to cast “judgment” on those that he deems are not good enough to live by his standards. This often switches between the two perspectives, the police and the student, and a conversation that pops up occasionally in the police force is if what they are doing to catch this killer is really the right thing to do, because the killer really is only killing criminals and other mass murderers. Honestly this compounds upon history too, as in the winner gets to decide, or the victor is the one who writes the storybooks. Thus, to say, if the police caught the killer, the police would be deemed heroes, but if the killer killed off all the police, the killer would be deemed as righteous and not opposable.

                This just shows that there really is no difference between good and evil, just a matter of perspective. I like to rant about the difference between this because of sometimes how unjust a school system is, but Jekyll’s real point was to remove anger and other malevolent feelings. This would be interesting if it worked, but some of these emotions are what makes us human. If I saw a person who never got angry, I would not actually classify them as a human. It would be more like a robot if a person were to act like that, not to mention that competitiveness would be stomped out, and since I was raised on competitiveness, I think I would be bored for most of my life.