Responsibility of the Cost of Life

     Depening on the circumstances, there are differences to how people will react to the responsibility and cost of life, and also the zeal to survive. If a situation is seemingly impossible to escape from or to survive in, people may react with acceptance and just accept their fate as is, or they will react by fighting tooth and nail until the final second.

    The Titanic, for example, was a ship that was supposed to be unsinkable, according to those that built the ship, but an iceberg ripped out on side and the ship sank, killing over a thousand people. Some say that the engineers who built the ship should be responsible, but I say that the captain should be. The engineers are not at fault for building a supposed unsinkable ship and have the ship sunk, for any ship is sinkable, but the captain of the ship who was maneuvering the ship and crashed into the iceberg should be responsible for the lives of the people, if he escaped. This situation also goes back to the zeal to survive, for some on the ship would have accepted their fate and died in the ship, but the others would have been fighting to escape and get on any object that would float in order to stay out of the freezing water and survive.

    In The Call of the Wild, Buck fights to survive as a sled dog. In the beginning of his "career" he is ignorant on the ways of survival out in the cold, brumal land. The other dogs teach him and he learns quickly how to burrow into the ground for warmth and how to steal food from the humans in order to eat more. Then, later in the book Buck has a feeling of the wild calling him, and under a new owner he ventures out into the woods and wonders for many days. Buck happens upon a herd of moose and he fights for days in order to kill the leader of the herd. The moose fights for those four days until he literally cannot anymore, this survival instinct that pushed the moose farther than maybe another moose or a human in this situation would have been able to do just because the moose wanted to survive, but when the moose was too tired to fight back he accepted his fate as Buck killed him.

     So, in a life or death situation, how would you react? Would you accept your fate, or would you go down fighting? Think of these two situations and imagine yourself in them, as a passenger on the Titanic, as Buck, and as the moose.