Romeo and Juliet: Acts 1&2

     I must say, the story of Romeo and Juliet has never been my favorite and definitely not the best example of a love story. I read this story and watched the film in my freshman year of high school, and I still remember my facial expression of pure confusion. I was really interested in the story line because it was set in a different time and it was nice to compare today's plays with any Shakespeare story. However, I did read Othello my senior year and I do believe that Othello is a better choice than Romeo and Juliet because it touches on more serious present day topics such as racism.
     The two main topics that I got from this play are love and power. Let's face it, the Capulets and the Montagues were fighting and killing each other because they wanted some kind of control over one another. They despised each other so much that they would do anything to see the other suffer. That sounds quite similar to what a specific person values in our present day. Power is something we deal with on a daily basis it seems because people will do whatever it takes to be first or liked by a large amount of people. Don't get me wrong, there is good and bad power but why invest your day to day life into such negativity?
     Now with love, it's hard to explain because love is complicated. It doesn't have to be a girlfriend or boyfriend relationship, it can be with anyone; mom, dad, sister, brother, pet, grandparents, etc. However, this play showed a lack of self-love which is all you hear today from anyone. The famous "you have to love yourself, before you could love someone else" is clearly not what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote this play, at least to me.
     If I could choose one positive thing about this play it would be to do what you feel is right for you. No matter what anyone says or thinks of what it is you like, it really shouldn't matter to anyone else anyway. Do I want to be in charge of my own destiny? Absolutely, without question. Coming from a culture where family is the core of who you are, there really isn't much room to be able to like anything because in the back of your mind you wonder is this going to make my family proud? Or maybe it's just my way of thinking. America is so diverse that now a lot of the cultures that think this way are becoming more and more Americanized, which makes it seem that the millennials are rebelling. In reality we are just molding ourselves to what is normal for us.
     That is clearly something Romeo and Juliet were doing in a sense. Towards the end, they were beginning to value what they wanted over what they thought their families would think of them. Which is why Shakespeare is still extremely relevant, different time period with the same core issues years later.