Abandon Ship

Last week, we did a boat activity where we had to chose who was to get booted off of the stranded boat. Surprisingly, a lot of the characters I thought were to stay and which characters I thought were to leave, didn't. The character I was playing was Quarter Master MacDonald, and little was known about me. My role sheet said that I served in the navy, and I suffered injuries to both of my hands from an explosion to the point where I couldn't use them. I was married, and I had four children in the U.S. 

When we started, it was surprising to me when the rest of the shipmates chose to kick off characters like the pregnant women and her husband, or the fat self-made millionaire. In my opinion, those two characters were equally important as the man who was going to release important information to the public to help with the world's ecology problem. But, in the rest of the shipmate's eyes, people like the pregnant women and the fat man were not important just because they didn't seem to have any important reasons to stay; they didn't have anything to offer to the world. Maybe the pregnant women was so important to me because not only would she be taking her own life, but also her unborn baby as well. As for the husband, I think that he chose to go too because they are a pair- they are young and in love and one cannot live without the other. As for the self-made millionaire, he chose to leave because he was a little overweight and thought he was taking up too much room. I feel that today we are all so quick to judge people based on their outer appearance rather than people's worth. This man must have been brilliant to become as successful as he had, yet he was thrown off because of his body and not because of his brains. Along with my character, I was thrown off for the same reason. Nobody knew anything about me, making me useless to society. Also, my hands didn't work, so I was useless to the shipmates. 

Tying this activity back to the discussion we recently had about stereotypes, I feel that this process of judgement and dismissal occurs everyday within society. Within the first 7 seconds of meeting somebody, our initial impressions are made. Whether these impressions are that the person is fat, tall, skinny, mean, caring, funny- they aren't based off of any factual information. They are just made because of what we see, or because of what we have heard.  I think that the same thing happened on the boat. We got on the boat, read everybody's description, and then chose who we were going to kick off based on the two or three sentences about them. I think that is why the fat guy was thrown off, and I was thrown off, the person with useless hands, and the elderly people were thrown off-  we all thought that those people weren't anything to society or they weren't as important to save because of their outer appearance. 

I liked this activity because it was based on a true story, and we also got to experience how people act and how people justify their choices. Every person had a reason in their own mind as to why they wanted to throw somebody off. But nobody had a legitimate reason that would truly make it okay to throw that person off the boat in real life. All of the reasons were based off of judgement, and I find it interesting how everything our class has talked about is beginning to tie back together to form a bigger picture, and I'm looking forwards to the next discussion to see how it relates as well.