By Hy Luu

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — On Sept. 8, 2022, the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, was announced as deceased by the British Royal Family during her visit to the Balmoral Castle. Unexpectedly, her reception was quite mixed, ranging from emotions of grievance to joy from the ordeal; but does she deserve it?

Let’s first start with exploring her accomplishments: Elizabeth once served during WW2 in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service when she had turned 18 years old, she felt a sense of duty to her homeland and wanted to enlist despite her parent’s objection. Queen Elizabeth II trained for 6 weeks to become an auto mechanic to repair logistic vehicles. Although her role was physically far from the front, she was in no way safe from danger.

After the war, she inherited the throne when King George VI passed away and was then crowned Queen. Elizabeth led the devastated country into a time of peace and reconstruction. The commonwealth’s success was largely attributed to her; it went from nine members when she was in power, But it climbed up to 54 members as she reigned ceremonially over them.

Lastly, Elizabeth II served as an amazing ambassador for the British Empire. By traveling to the United States Congress to address a joint session, Elizabeth II delivered speeches that captured the hearts of congressmen. But her travels weren’t just limited to the U.S; she also went to Ireland to mend Ireland and England’s rocky relationship by addressing her own country’s misdeed. This was a huge sensation for the people of Ireland in which they felt that the monarchy didn’t just exist to oppress them, and many chose to forgive the Queen and her nation.

Those were her most notable accomplishments, so let’s look at her grievances. During the post war recovery of Britain, many of their colonies started to resist British influence and called for self governance. So, on behalf of the Queen, the British Security Force started to crackdown and detain all of anti British advocates, and sent them into village-camps where they forced them into labor or starvation. This is something akin to Stalin’s Gulag but on a lesser scale.

In conclusion, after all of her backstory and her accomplishments, I believe Elizabeth II was a decent person and for her position as a monarch, she wasn’t paranoid and didn’t try to steer the nation for her personal agenda, (expect for nullifying laws that taxes her) and most of her grievances was horrible people using the queen as a justification to oppress those under the Empire.

And that, the Queen didn’t prohibit or spoke against those people, a case of inaction which is a must lesser crime then those who acted ti bring harm and torture, like Joseph Stalin.

But, those are just my opinions, let’s look at what Students of SilverCreek thoughts are about the queen.

Anand Yadlapatia, a Silver Creek sophomore: “I was a bit shocked but I wasn’t surprised by it (the news of her death)”

Devon Nguyen: a junior at Silver Creek: “I didn’t really care about the Queen”

Duyen Nguyen, a Silver Creek sophomore student: “I also didn’t really care about her death”

It seems like more students didn’t really care about the queen and her death. I think it largely is because of tension between Americans and British people (not politically) and they would make fun of each other constantly, and Americans are known to be disrespectful to other countries which is no surprise when they didn’t really care about the Queen dying.