In American Literature this week we spent a class studying a quote from Tom about the Great Depression. He says, "To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, where the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy." Every student in my class wrote their own paragraph about the imagery in this quotation as a rough draft for a prepared reading paragraph. But I want to focus more on what this quotation implies about the cause of the Great Depression, rather than the literary devices used in it.
Clearly, there's a lot that can be read into these few lines. It's an interesting metaphor throughout, but I want to look specifically toward the beginning: "Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes...." Who exactly does Tom blame in this? Where does he place the responsibility? Oftentimes, when proposing two options, writers will place the more significant one second. The first option might be logical, then the second contradicts it and is more thought-provoking. Maybe because it is meant to correct the first. Maybe because the more recent option will stick in the reader's mind. But either way, it's a trick that I've noticed time and time again. But does it apply here? The unusualness of the second concept - failing one's eyes instead of one's eyes failing- seems to say yes, the second option is meant to be considered more than the first.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is the blame game. Do we blame the whole society for the failure of the economy? Do we blame the economic system itself? Can we even place blame squarely on any one thing? There are so many different theories as to what caused the Great Depression that it seems impossible that it could be any singular cause. More likely, the matter is too complicated to grasp within one 384-word blog post. But the general conceptual question remains: Do we fail society, or does society fail us? Can we fault a system that we ourselves created without faulting ourselves?
I believe that it is a two way street with society failing people and the people failing society. I think that this occurs because people or the base for all society and failing society is equivalent to mistakes and imperfection. Society has the ability to miss treat people (ex. segregation, genocide, and stereotypes) and on the flip side people fail society when they create/change the norms of society. A corrupt system is derived from unjust and corruption in those who make up the system.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you took a quote from a book and applied to the general scheme of things because this allows you as a reader to gain more insight about the author's point of views and the applications the text has in the real world. The whole idea of failing one's eyes instead of one's eyes failing implies the blame game, as you had stated. But instead of choosing one side to blame, I believe that blame, even if it is unequal blame, more often falls on both parties. While society constructs the ideas that lead us to non-fulfillment, we the people are society so it's fair to say that we fail society and society fails us as well, our eyes had failed us but we failed our eyes as well.
ReplyDelete"Do we fail society, or does society fail us? Can we fault a system that we ourselves created without faulting ourselves?" In the context of the Holocaust, this is a question that continues to haunt Europe. Can generations that are products of that society escape the long shadow of their predecessors?
ReplyDeleteI honestly had a good time reading in on your blog and seeing how you used quotes directly from the text and incorporating it into your blog. Your blog has really nice flow and pieces together effectively in a way where the reader can easily follow what you are trying to say. I thought your take on the "blame-game" was pretty interesting as well. I believe that we can't really blame anyone in particular for the Great Depression because it was caused by so many different things. Blaming one person or thing just wouldn't be fair.
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