Acts of injustice happen all the time. Many of the times no one chooses to speak up against the action. This is not because people do not find anything wrong with these actions, but rather because they do not realize what is going on in their brain. When we experience something we feel is wrong, our brain will do whatever is in its power to stop us from intervening and standing out. After doing nothing we are then exposed to the results of our injectors making us feel guilty leading us to speak out in the future. When faced with a moral dilemma, humans have the tendency to find a justification to ignore it without realizing the consequences. Despite knowing this from others examples, people default to doing nothing. In Ethan Canin’s The Palace Thief, the narrator is a history teacher who truly believes him the importance of students learning life lessons through the study of history. When the narrator who is helping judge a competition realizes a contestant is cheating, he tells the principal who is sitting next to him. The principal then tells him to just …show more content…
As put by Patel, “Action is what separates belief from opinion. Beliefs are imprinted through action”. After feeling guilty for his action, or rather is lack of action, Patel wrote his essay that is empowering people to speak up and speak out. He uses very strong language to help people feel they need to act on their opinion in order to prove it is truly a belief. The narrator in The Palace Thief, by the end of the story, came to peace with himself saying, “One does not make history without conviction. It is enough to know that I did speak” (203). He finally realized that omissions are not okay and that he needs to speak up. If he did not speak out he would have never had the possibility of changing the