The Modern Puritans

     The first thing that leapt to my mind when I heard the words "modern Puritan" was, "Mormons!" (and totally not because I saw the Book of Mormon just last month).

     To put it simply, Mormons are a group of people who follow the religion of Mormonism. Mormonism is classified as a subcategory of Christianity, but they differ in significant ways (i.e. the first Mormons followed the Young [pun intended if italics wasn't enough of a hint] American Moses to Sal Tlay Ka Siti, Utah in 1844). Their Broadway representation portrayed them as wholly faithful people with traditions and beliefs as cemented and varied and strange as the next sector of Christianity.

      But then I started thinking, and before long, I realized that hey, wait, aren't a lot of religions in some way restrictive on their believers and, to some degree, intolerant of other beliefs or ideas? Aside from the friendly, do-gooding Mormons, certain churches (read: Westboro Baptist) come to mind when the word "intolerant" is brought to the table.

      But then I kept thinking, and after a little while, my head started going around in fuzzy circles, which is when I know I need to take a step back and take a clearer look at the heart of my problem: the idea of the modern Puritan. Okay, well, what was a Puritan? What defined them?

     The most general, all-around description off of the top of my head is, "group of people exiled due to their extreme religious beliefs".

     Okay, well, the word "extreme" is subjective, so how about just "group of people exiled due to their religious beliefs"? And, well, that kind of phrasing reminds me an awful lot of the Holocaust. And if the 1930s and '40s were only about seventy or so years ago, then that's moderately recent, right?

     Right, maybe not, since smartphones didn't exist back then and any time before an iPhone is practically prehistoric.

     Maybe there are countries or areas in the world right now in the year 2013 A.D. persecuting people due to their religious beliefs, but none are turning up in my mind, so what else can I do but go to Google?

     According to an article on Rome Reports, Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world thanks to the intolerant governments and citizens of China, Cuba, North Korea, and the like.

     ...Right, so we're back to the Christianity bit.

     But how about taking the idea of the Puritans beyond just persecution? How about just "oppressed people"? After all, the Puritans oppressed themselves in many ways due to their own traditions and beliefs.

     And that is when the stork delivered my epiphany.

     In a very liberal way of interpreting the phrase, we are all "modern Puritans" in just about every aspect of life. We are all oppressed and held fast by laws, authority, physical and mental capabilities, and/or morality. Kids must be educated, I can't sparkle naturally in the sun like Edward Cullen, and none of us should beat people to death with a sledgehammer somehow made from the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan while high on crystal meth while in the United States of America.

     To be perfectly honest, for a while, I thought that I had nothing in common with the Puritans in The Crucible. However, I realize now that I do, and despite how "well, duh" it is, the fact is that we are all simply  human.

John Proctor: Hero or Stooge?

     According to Merriam-Webster, a hero is a) "a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities" b) "the chief male character in a story, play, movie, etc." c) "a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability" or d) "an illustrious warrior".
     According to the same Encyclopædia Britannica, a stooge is a) "a weak or unimportant person who is controlled by a powerful person, organization, etc." b) "a performer in a show who says and does foolish things that other performers make jokes about".

Meet my hero/stooge chart which will help determine the fate of John Proctor's legacy.

Hero | Stooge

     |

     |

      Although Proctor was arguably the "chief male character in a...play", he was no demigod prowling the farms of colonial America and he wasn't portrayed as a soldier or shown to have had any sort of military affiliation. That alone cancels out most of the definitions for "hero".

Hero | Stooge
I     |
     |

     As evidenced by many scenes and actions, Proctor was a man of his own virtues and possibly the most realistically imperfect man in the entire play. Did he have his flaws? Yes. He cheated on his faithful wife with their teenage servant. He was not a hundred percent faithful to the Puritan religion. He was brash, temperamental, and stubborn.
     Was he brave? Yes. He accepted his affair with Abigail, but he was strong enough inside to understand that what he was doing was wrong and had the willpower to completely shut it down, even if there was a small part of him that didn't want to. He ripped up warrants and confessions and made petitions. He stood up against the Salem court and pointed his finger where nobody else pointed.
     But, was he admired? Did the townspeople of Salem really respect him? If evidence shows that they ultimately refused him and instead went with the words of adolescent girls (a decision that resulted in his execution), is that really a hero or just a martyr? 

Hero | Stooge
I     |
     |

     Despite his persistence, courage, and logic, he was still condemned to death with eighteen other "witches". Politically, this means that he was weak and unimportant. He was controlled by the townspeople, the court. For a certain period of time, Abigail was also the puppeteer of one of the strings binding his limbs. He personally did not accomplish the task of saving Elizabeth because it was the Puritans' values that saved her (although, indirectly, I suppose you could say he did because he was the one who impregnated her...), and he achieved nothing as far as his second desire of wanting to save his friends either. He instigated guilt upon Danforth and the others towards the end, but not enough to save the remaining convicts who were sentenced to death, himself included.

Hero | Stooge
I     | I
     |

     The second point needs a little more metaphor, but bear with me here. At some point, the Salem Witch Trials became a circus, a performance. Abigail and the girls raked in the fame as the lead actresses; Danforth was the ringmaster who raked in the cash. Proctor was much lower than them on the ladder—maybe he was one of the clowns who are the butt of all the physical and verbal jokes? And though Abigail and Danforth didn't literally turn him into a laughingstock, they saw him and what he stood for as a joke of an obstacle in their way to their personal goals. He—along with many others—was a victimized performer in the circus that was the Salem Witch Trials.

Hero | Stooge
I     | II
     |

     Though of course, these terms and his actions are largely subjective. The humane part of me that read John Proctor's story would say that he was a hero, a martyr, a heroic martyr. However, dictionary definitions and the people and story of Salem would likely deem him as a stooge, and  in this case, that is also the label I'm putting on him.

Arrivals...There Goes the Neighborhood

       Academic Center kids at Whitney Young are sheltered.

       Yes, they spend passing periods with about two thousand high school students (who are sometimes literally twice their height) and attend elective classes with same said two thousand high school students and take mostly honors classes as middle schoolers. Yes, their middle school years are much more similar to that of scary, intimidating high school than most other seventh or eighth graders in the country.

        Yet, they also all take the exact same classes (with exception of electives) with the exact same teachers. This allows for the comparing of homework answers with just about any one of the other one hundred and ten people in the grade. This allows for group test cramming at lunch and general complaints about the difficulty of Mr. Moran's Geometry course. Friendships are quickly created and easily kept because two years of forty weeks of five days of six fifty-minute periods of no one but ackies can do that. The teachers purposefully plan out their assignments together so as to not overwhelm them. (They also get to see all the major school productions. For free.)

And that is why freshman year usually hits them so hard. Suddenly, everybody has different classes, different teachers, different schedules. The teachers aren't aware of the rest of a student's schedule, so they all simply make due with giving them assignments every single night. The masochistic ones who joined a sport discover that no matter what they do, they cannot get more than six or seven hours of sleep at night. Once the realization that they have to actually pay to see the Company or AAC show this year hits, that's when the full weight of frackie depression drops down onto their shoulders.

           But amidst all that, there’s still another change. Seeing their frackie friends in or out of classes is suddenly a rarity in itself, but at the same time, it's too much work and also several shades too awkward to try to befriend the abrupt abundance of sophomores in their classes...or the new freshmen who have already separated into cliques.

The arrival of the rest of their high school graduation grade is something significant, and it’s debatable as to whether or not it’s a bad thing. It symbolizes all the other aforementioned problems and uncomfortableness that suddenly arose. It symbolizes that the ackies are officially freshmen and no longer middle schoolers even if they did complete their freshman course load in eighth grade. It symbolizes the threads of their old social webs unweaving. It symbolizes new relationships just around the corner. It symbolizes change—a lot of unsure, hesitant change—because in the blink of an eye, the Academic Center kids who were the class of 2013 in just June are suddenly a class of 2017 that is five times larger and so much more intimidating and a spontaneous melding of the “cultures” that belong to frackies and non-frackies.

I don’t even know seventy percent of my grade's names anymore. All I do know is that with the new freshmen's arrival, our small, close-knit neighborhood has suddenly become a village. (Of course, who said that, "Arrivals...there goes the neighborhood," necessarily has to be about the neighborhood in question "going" for the worst? Sometimes, things simply have to make way for better things.)