Revenge In Everyday Life

Revenge is one of the most common human traits. When we have been wronged, more often then not our first instinct is to return the pain or hurt to the person who inflicted it upon you. When someone pushes you for instance, you can take one of two roads. You can push them back or you can choose to take the high road and avoid the confrontation entirely. I am not a big fan of revenge, and I avoid it whenever I can. It's my opinion that revenge is a tool for people who are too weak to control their emotions, and although I have been guilty of it on rare occasion, I find the idea of it to be silly. The best form of the concept of "revenge" is retribution, which takes it's most common shape in the form of law.

Revenge is a problem or a disease that takes over human emotion and causes total chaos and personal ruin. There is only one vaccine to the revenge disease and that is forgiveness. It doesn't take much will or effort to just follow your first instinct of hitting the person back who hit you. It takes a special kind of person however, to rise above it. To care about the person who harmed you, and to help sympathize with them. Just last thursday I was punched in the back of the head at school in the hallways by a guy who had a problem with me. Him and a friend of mine had a dispute and I got mildly involved. Once the dispute was settled between my friend and him, all the anger got put towards me even though I played such a minor role in it. I tried to avoid confrontation with this kid as much as possible, then he decided to walk up behind me and punch me in the head. After he hit me, I could feel the anger pumping through me, but I looked at the situation, and deduced that it was a stupid reason to be fighting in the first place, and that if I were to strike him back, it would only worsen the problem, so I decided to just let it go. The kid was punished for it, and has since apologized to me, which was the best possible outcome. Had I gotten revenge, the situation would not have turned out nearly as well.

Revenge was never always around, it came to being aong with the evolution of mankind. It was developed as a solution to many of mans increasing social situations. Forgiveness was created in the same way. It was developed when peoples need for revenge started to go to too great of lengths. Perhaps the same scenario will occur. Perhaps once mankind has dealt with a certain level of revenge we will learn to be more tolerable of others mistakes, and learn to control our emotions and reactions better. But until that day comes, we will still see the war in Iraq, our soldiers in Afghanistan, and probably other wars and acts of terrorism to come.