Morals Are Created

Earlier in the year I read "The Lowest Animal" and as we dive deeper into the Inner Monsters unit, the quote I keep recalling is this one regarding morals

He is the only animal that has it. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the qualitywhich enables him to do wrong. It has no other office. It is incapable of performing any other function. It could never have been intended to perform any other. Without it, man could do no wrong...

I believe that the concepts of good and evil are just societal constructs. We're simply being in our everyday lives and in the actions we do, yet assign unneeded adjectives to describe our motives, our actions, and our thoughts. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shows how it is a man made thing, with humans good and evil morals are created within our minds, but Jekyll creates a tangible potion. His search and experiments to separate good and bad doesn't show that humans are inherently good OR evil, but that we are inherently curious, we desire to form concrete definition and proof for things that may not be explainable.

SHE lost but WE are winning

All throughout history it's been a trend that sometimes a sacrifice is needed to achieve a goal and make progress. This was demonstrated by many women during the Women's Right Movement. Alice Paul was one such woman who believed in radical reform to advance the rights of women, she went on a hunger strike in jail for the cause. It was seen during the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King, his assassination helped open the eyes of many, even those who were prejudice were saddened by his death. Though he was vital in improving the rights of minorities while he was alive, his death did even more. Everyday soldiers put their lives on the line to protect citizens of the United States. Edna's suicide in The Awakening may have seemed like a loss at first, but it was needed to instigate a push towards  equality, it was a personal loss but not a loss for humanity.

Rise

Though in America, us women have made considerable advances as far as our rights and freedoms are concerned, in many underdeveloped and developing countries women are still viewed as property or a means to an end (necessary to make children).  In an article I read on CBS News, Afghanistan is considered one of the worst countries for women to live in. 87% of the women are illiterate, and 80% face forced marriages. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, this oppression is seen as Mariam and Laila are abused by Rasheed and forced to wear burqas. When the Taliban comes to power, laws are made that ban them from going in public without a man and prevents women from getting an education. After trying to escape Rasheed's abuse, Mariam and Laila are sent right back because private matters are not the concern of the government. So though in America women possess many freedoms, it is important that we still advocate for the rights of those who cannot advocate for themselves. Even though the book is nonfiction, it contains the all too true realities of what women endure in not just Afghanistan, but hundreds of other countries as well.

Shell Shock

To us, they fought their last battle days, months, even years ago. But to them, they fight is every single day. It is not only physical injuries carried home by soldiers, but those of the mind as well, with the most common being PTSD. Though it can be interpreted that Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five is actually time traveling, I believe he is hallucinating as a result of PTSD and often those hallucinations seem very real to sufferers of it. Throughout the story Billy has nightmares, is startled very easily, and constantly is recalling horrific events in his life. As a reader we may even begin feeling helpless as a result of the spontaneous flipping through time, similar to how those with PTSD feel. Vonnegut wants to convey to his readers through the experiences of Billy that war is a terrible thing and warps and twists the human mind in many ways. It also makes sense that he would include the disorder in his story because he himself was in war, and some of the events in the story parallel with his life. I think that the way in which Vonnegut wrote the story was very ingenious, on the surface it is a typical sci-fi book much like sufferers of PTSD seem "normal" on the outside, but then you go deeper and realize there is actually much more to the story, like there is much more to a person.