On: Bears

Timothy Treadwell is a peculiar type of person to say the least. I watched the "documentary" about his bear videos for the first time during my junior year in high school. Interesting experience. We watched it as a part of our transcendentalism unit, but I thought it was far from transcendentalist. 

Timothy claims he is "protecting" these bears from the cruelty of the real world, but these bears are in a national park. It is already protected from the cruel world… He comes off as a mentally unstable human being who thinks that living in the wild with bears is fun and somehow educational. I guess these ideas turned on him given the nature of his death.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fun to watch because of the humor elements, but that is pretty much it. I was never able to decide whether he was making it all up and acting crazy for the cameras, or he actually believed that he was helping these bears. Given the nature of this class, I’m gonna go with he was probably lying and acting for the cameras.