The Man and the Lion

A man and a lion happened to meet on the road, and fell into conversation. It wasn't long before they began to argue.

          "Any fool knows that a lion is stronger than a man," the lion boasted. "A lion is the king of the Beasts!"

          "He may be, but a man is mightier yet, and everybody knows it!" proclaimed the man. "Just look at that statue over there!" And he pointed to a tall marble statue by the roadside, showing a man gripping a lion by the throat.

          "That proves nothing," protested the lion. "After all, a man carved that stature! It would have been quite a different scene had a lion made it!"

There are two sides to every story

          We all know that in real life, a lion would completely destroy a man in a fight. But this odd portrayal of an argument over who is better is necessary to get the point across that there are indeed two sides to every story. Like everything in this world, a story has an opposite side. Just like there are positive and negative, north and south, poison and antidote, and water and hot sauce. You should always listen to the opposite side of the story, even though you are already set on your own opinion. Just think about what would happen if everybody was that stubborn and unwilling to accept a different view point.

          First off, our justice system is completely based off of this in the way that the judge must listen to both sides of the story to make the correct decision. I am not saying that the judge will make the decision right every time, but without listening to both sides of the argument, he will have a diminished chance of getting the decision right.

          Another thing is that many parents out there must listen to their children when they are accusing them of something or punishing them for something. If their child, let's say, got a detention for talking in class, then the parent would get upset. But what if the only reason the child was talking was because another kid was provoking him/her and would not stop for quite some time. It really isn't the child's fault in this situation.

          If we never listen to other person's argument, we will become stubborn and narrow minded. If we become narrow minded we will not be open to other people’s ideas and opinions and then in turn we will not progress as a race because we refuse to take in other ideas. If one person thinks that a plane should be run on water and another thinks it should be run on fuel, and person B wins because he is so stubborn, we will never have that great idea of a plane being run on water. We would be so regressive and not have any new technology and be overtaken by other countries like Russia or China. They could in theory, “bomb us back to the Stone Age”. And I know nobody wants that.