Celebrating Darkness | Argumentation #3

          In a world where speaking of death, natural disaster, or tragedy has become normal, humorous even, some may wonder whether or not these thoughts are natural, inherited even. In my experience, dark tendencies and thoughts must be formulated over time and from experience, especially in the world that we were raised in.

From youth, death or any dark thoughts has been inarguably a major taboo. With that in mind, people have tried to block out ideas of death, which added some sort of mystery to it. Personally, that in a way attracted me to this topic. Though it scared me, it was still something that I couldn’t help thinking about because it was simply something I’d never seen first-hand. In that, finally experiencing that has made it more acceptable to me, in a sense. That pre-existing fear had eventually faded away, and this thing that I was taught was a taboo became, less of one.

            On the other hand, there are places in the world where death and dark matters are completely normal. In places like Laos, Vietnam, and various indigenous communities, funerals are open, for all to see and pay their respects. This fear that I had doesn’t exist and is never taught to the children of these places, and this taboo is integrated into their society. Places like Mexico take death and celebrate the lives of people. With that said, this still shows that this drawing mystique of death and dark thoughts is a result of what we are taught and experience, rather than something completely normal.

We are taught how to think that dark matters are truly dark. If people in the US are taught that things like death aren’t dark, and death that death isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there’s a chance that there’d be less fear in this society, and things that are perceived as dark wouldn’t be perpetuated into further generations.