I witnessed a police arrest for the first time in Worcester on Saturday night. It was cool outside and I was taking an afternoon walk near university park. Suddenly, I saw police chasing an old man. As I later learnt, he was suspected to possess and sell illegal drugs. After a few minutes, the old man was caught. And after some investigation, the police finally gathered enough evidence to convict him. It's the same old story--the evil getting what he deserves and the good winning in the end. This kind of story had been very satisfactory to me since childhood, but I could not help wondering if the old man really deserved the severe punishment. Quoting Thomas Moore in Utopia, "if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them ?" Could the old man really have helped it? He was dressed shabbily, and was yelling and spitting at the police during their investigation, he also spoke in a weird kind of dialect. Apparently, he wasn't well educated, maybe to a degree that his sense of right and wrong are beyond our comprehension. Or perhaps he committed the crime despite the knowledge that it is wrong. As can be observed from his dressing, he is a man with very limited means, hardly enough to keep body and soul together. Can we really blame him for doing something just to keep alive even though what his actions are horribly wrong?

Thinking about it gives me the creeps, but what if it had been me? What if I did not have a mother who believed that education was important and consequently been deprived of my right to education? What if my family had not considered it profitable for me to pursue a higher education? Presently, I have many doubts about my future, about what I would become. However, if I had been deprived of even a basic education, I would know without doubting where I would be... I could very easily end up in his position, or maybe even worse ones...

Sometimes, I complain about the situations I am in. Sometimes, I would ask why don't I have an Ivy League education instead of one at Clark? Why wasn't I born with a natural gift for poetry like Shakespeare? Why am I not as good at math as Leonhard Euler so that I would be creating the rules of mathematics instead of memorizing them? Why had I not been gifted with an eloquence such as that of Marcus Antonius or Winston Churchill? Why am I not as humorous as Mark Twain?....After witnessing the arrest, I stopped asking those questions and realized that I am already lucky to be what I am now. Even though I should not be content with my current abilities, because as they say, "satisfaction is the road to destruction", the least I can do is to make the best use of the abilities and resources I have and make everyday count.