“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”

In the play Oedipus Rex, there were two men; one’s name was Teiresias and the other was Oedipus. Teiresias was physically blind, but not mentally; he had the ability to tell the future. Oedipus could physically see, but not mentally. Teiresias was trying to tell Oedipus that he was going to end up murdering his father sometime in the future, but he didn’t want to listen to him. Oedipus was blind to the truth. 

I know how scary it would be to know the future. I’m sure there are going to be things that I do in the future that I wouldn’t want to know right now. I feel that if you find what your future is you would deny some things, think you would never do that, and you would probably be afraid. Maybe that was Oedipus’ problem; he thought he could never murder someone. You can’t really blame him for being human and being scared and denying the future. If you had a fortune teller, would you ask when you’re going to die or if anything tragic will happen in your life? I wouldn’t; if I knew when I was going to die, I would be afraid. When the time gets closer, you’ll just sit there being frightened the whole time. Instead, you could not know, and when the time comes for you to die it wouldn’t bother you. You wouldn’t know and you’ll live life like normal, being happy. What I’m getting at is that the future is scary, and knowing what will happen in the future would be scarier to live with. Have you ever gotten news about what might happen, and you’re scared because you know it might happen, but you don’t know for sure? The anxiety of knowing what’s going to happen is a lot worse than not knowing and just living like nothing is ever going to happen. 

So, my argument is, Oedipus might have seemed to be the one to blame when most of us would be blind to the truth just like him; he wasn’t wrong, he was human. Murdering obviously wasn’t right, and I’m not agreeing with that at all, but what I am saying is, none of us really want to know the future. While in the story Oedipus may have looked bad, he wasn’t to blame for thinking and acting like a human. We humans aren’t all that different when it comes to being afraid of the unknown; we just need to understand each other.