Almost every middle school student has gone through similar lessons in their education, from Ancient China and the Yangtze River, to Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent. Remembering how the Yangtze river gained its yellow color or why the Fertile Crescent was so profitable, has never really stuck with me or any other, now much older, student. Instead, we remember the gory, gruesome, tragic details that allowed us to follow along in stories, replacing characters of history with ourselves. Those were the facts that we could recall — although vaguely, they still struck the, “Oh, yeah,” button in our memories.

While Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s love story did give me the energy I needed to stay awake every morning during history, I knew that their story was not the highlight of other students’ learning. The real fascination was Hammurabi’s Code and all of its cruel, disheartening details that made any preteen, superhero-loving fan’s heart race. His phrase, “an eye for an eye,” was brought up back then as a concept to later be tested on, but I think it stayed ingrained in the minds of students for reasons other than that. Not only in the students of that sixth grade classroom, but in the minds of countless American youth across the country. This concept of revenge is seen in circumstances as simple as taking food from a sibling because they took from yours, but also goes as far as America’s criminal justice system. More acutely, Hammurabi’s Code and the ideas it evokes in American youth are trivial to understanding the support and endorsement of the death penalty.

From the time when I was first informed of what it was, the death penalty always seemed disgusting to me. I questioned why I felt this way, knowing it was not my morals or superior character that guided me into this decision, but simply my humanity and compassion. This was the conclusion seventh grade me reached, until she finally was opened to new perspectives.

During the time of the pandemic, which was seventh grade for me, many students including myself began to engage in political discussions or more accurately, uninformed arguments, with their friends. I’m still not sure what evoked this sudden activism in preteens across the country — boredom, or maybe the more apparent disparities within America, but these discussions were highly passionate and we disputed the most controversial topics in the country. My personal favorite was the death penalty, and it still is, as I find it interesting to see how my dearest friends whom I hold so much love for, take no care in ending the life of another. It took me long to realize that they, like so many others, were followers of Hammurabi’s Code.

The idea of retribution in the criminal justice system, is so clearly exemplified in the discussions I have had with friends as they ask me, “So if someone killed your dog, you would want them to live?” I can still recall their shocks of horror when I would say, “Yes, I would,” as though I was the murderer in this scenario. I finally have understood that they see the death penalty as a way of placing blame and getting revenge for what has happened in the most equal way possible. It was never that these were bad, evil people — they were actually my favorite people — but that their belief system was based on the idea that it should be a life for a life, or like said much further back in time, “an eye for an eye.”

Seeing as retribution is one of the key components of sentencing and punishment in the criminal justice system, it is not hard to see that if a well-educated, grown adult can endorse this idea then so can a teenager navigating controversy. Still, however, this need to place blame and hurt someone as they have hurt others is so deeply ingrained into American minds, that it leads us blindly into inflicting suffering. This belief is what helps our societies to dehumanize individuals in prison and disregard their character as a means of helping us to hurt them to match what they have done. Recognizing that this foundational belief is taught in sixth grade history is important because it helps us to understand what it truly is — history.

If I had been asked in sixth grade what punishment I would want for the person who ever killed my mom — the most common ultimatum during that age — I would’ve chosen to push Earth and everyone on it into a black hole. Never in my life, though, did it ever occur to me that students who were the same age as me and were my best friends, would want an individual to truly die in order to pay for what they had done. Consequences were understandable, but for me and so many others, death was and always has been out of the question.

It falls on how much that sixth grade history stuck with you and what specifically did — was it Mark Antony dying for his lover or Hammurabi’s cruelty? Was it seeking new lessons to learn from or gaining satisfaction when enemies would fight to the death for victory? Was it identifying perspective and rationality for both sides or choosing one side and hoping they make the other one suffer? I’m no saint, but “an eye for an eye” makes me feel revolted. But in American society today, it doesn’t seem to have that effect on many others.