Carlos John M.

Barrera V24; BS-Applied Economics De La Salle University

Reflection Paper: The Elephant Man

The word person is often mistaken with as synonymous the word human. People think that being a human is being a person and vice versa. Contrary to this belief, there are qualifiers for a human to be a person and for a person to be a human. To be a person, one must have a reason and consciousness and to be a human, one must have a flesh and a soul. In the movie, The Elephant Man, both of the said definition of a human and a person applies to John Merrick (main character). Therefore, we can identify him as a person and a human and not an elephant as other claimed he is. Mr. Merrick may have a deformed flesh but still, he has a body and a soul. Additionally, regardless of his condition, he can reason out, understand and comprehend things, and he is conscious that he is alive and thus we can say that he is a human being. At the start of the movie, we saw that John Merrick was displayed and ridiculed in a Victorian Freak Show in London where Bytes used him as a source of income. Since then, Mr. Merrick lost his self-esteem as his dignity was stepped on by the people who treated him as an elephant man and as a mentally retarded person. Fortunately, Dr. Frederick Treves came and was intrigue by Merricks condition. He then brought him to the hospital to examine and cure his ailment. With the help of Mr. Treves, his wife and some other people in the hospital, he step-bystep regained his confidence and dignity as a person. Society nowadays is not much different with how it was back then in the sense that people who were handicapped in terms of physical, emotional, psychological, economical, and societal aspects of life are being dehumanized by others. An example of this is the way rich people look down on marginalized people. They treat them as lesser humans. They are seen as dead weight that only keep pulling down the earth to hell. Another example is the way a simple bully takes advantage of his weaker classmates. He treats them as lesser humans because he measures the quality of a human being with their strength. A last example would be the way most men treats women who offer sex for money. They are viewed as if they were no longer humans because they let people touch them just for money. As a Lasallian, I can uphold human life and human dignity by loving and understanding others. Loving because if you love God, if you love yourself, if you love the people around you, you would not do anything that might destroy another humans life and dignity. You always care for the people you love. Also, by understanding others, you consider the situation of other people and if you understand that everyone has his own strengths and weaknesses and that no one is above the other, you will firmly maintain ones life and dignity.