The Golden Rule

    This week and a little bit of last week, we were assigned to read 1001 nights. I just want to say that out of all the cultural stories we've read so far, this is by far my favorite! (: I just love the way there is a big story that's framed around a bunch of little stories. It's like putting pieces of a puzzle together, each little story is related to another part of another story. Also, just like a puzzle, when you piece everything together it reveals one big picture. 

     My favorite story within 1001 Nights was the story about the king and the physician. The physician cured the king of his leprosy and the king rewarded him with riches. The vizier was jealous and sought out to ruin the new friendship. When he approached the king, the king was angry because the vizier was speaking bad about the physician who saved him, so he told the vizier the story of the "king and the bird". Later, the vizier managed to get the king to turn against the physician  The king sentenced the physician to death. Long story short, the physician got back at the king by tricking him into turning pages in a book that gave him poison ivy. I like how from this one little story, you can learn a general life lesson. The lesson being "do on to others what you want done to you", meaning treat others as you would like to be treated. (:

 This also reminds me of this lifetime movie I watched called "girlfight". In the movie, there was this group of girls who we're mean. This outsider girl who wanted to be in their group really bad because they were popular and she was an outcast that no one liked. So, the girl (i don't remember her name so I'll just call her Sammy) made fun of her own friend so the group would notice her and make her apart of their group. So after Sammy did this, the popular girl of the group was impressed by her dissing her friend and allowed the Sammy to be apart of the group. After a while, the popular girl started to like Sammy better than all her friends. So the other friends got jealous and told the popular girl that Sammy was trying to get with her boyfriend (which was a lie they made up to sabotage the friendship between the popular girl and Sammy). So of course the popular girl got mad and the whole group decided to attack her and video tape it and post it online. Sammy tried to reason with her and explain that she didn't do those things but the girls still attacked her anyway. Long story short, Sammy ended up getting the girls arrested for online bullying. I feel like this relates to the physican and the king because the popular girl listened to her friends lies instead of believing the Sammy. And just like the king, the popular girl was punished, with the exception that she received jail time rather than being poisoned. I feel like this also goes well with the quote I posted above because if the popular girl would of showed MERCY to Sammy and not been so quick to judge based on what her friends said, she would not have had to go to jail! 

(Btw I'm sorry it's so long, I tried to summarize my thoughts as small as I could!)