Allowing Punishment

The episode that we watched in class titled “White Bear” left me with many different conflicting emotions. Part of me does not believe in punishing people physically no matter what they have done, but that is me looking at this situation from a religious standpoint. This means that I believe that I am not the one who is allowed to perform judgement on those who have done bad things, and that my morals do not allow me to hurt someone or allow someone to be punished simply because it is immoral. My religion would say that this person could still seek forgiveness from God, and my own personal judgement is non-reflective of the person who has done wrong. The other part of me believes that people who have done incredibly disgusting things, much as the woman in the episode kidnapped and filmed the murder of an innocent child, deserve horrible things. This does not mean that I agree with how they handled it in this episode, but I do believe that they should rot in very awful circumstances. I have very contradictory feelings about this subject, as a religious person but also very opinionated person. While watching the episode, I felt uncomfortable and weird about how they went about punishing this woman for her acts. The people who took part in making the punishment happen are equally as awful as the woman who murdered someone. I ask myself how we as a society can separate the good and the bad people if we were to allow yourself to use cruel and unusual punishments towards those who are imprisoned. We would all become people who are willing to put others in harm's way, which is criminal in my mind. Putting religious viewpoints aside, how can it be healthy for a community to punish a person without them feeling as though they can do this on a regular day-to-day basis? The entire thing seems very off and almost sets us back as humans, to days where we were not able to establish a real law/judgement system. Ultimately, this episode of Black Mirror left me feeling uneasy about how my classmates and other people in general feel about this kind of punishment and treatment of individuals. I like to believe i am open to learning and discussing different ideas and reasons behind people’s thoughts, but allowing a community to hurt an individual the way the people in this episode did is unacceptable.