Feleisha Antillon
Mr. Gowans
Language Arts 12
December 11, 2012
Is
Everybody Equal? Can Everybody Be Equal?
In
a society like The Giver, by Lois
Lowry, there is nothing but perfection everywhere. Everything is controlled, and ran
smoothly. There are no emotions what so
ever, the community doesn’t feel pain, love, nor hate. Everyone is assigned a job in the
community. They don’t know what they
will get until the ceremony of twelve, and then from then on they are working
citizens. Being controlled as they are,
could cause destruction as well as construct the society like in the book Anthem, by Ayn Rand, a young boy by the
name of Equality 7-2521 lives in a community where there is a higher power
called The House of Scholars, ran by a boy named Collective 0-0009. Nameless and deprived of love, Equality is
still a very ambitious boy looking for success.
Individuality is a big part of our
society today. We are all our own person,
no matter how hard people try to change you, not one person can be alike. There are brown people, white people, fat
people, skinny people, tall people, short people etc.
“Jonas has been
selected to be our next Receiver of Memory” (Lowry 60). Jonas gets the Receiver of Memory, but his
little sister, and his parents, and his friends all have different jobs, all to
fit their own personalities.
In
Anthem, Equality gets his job as a
street sweeper, even though he wanted to get into The House of Scholars. They don’t get to pick their jobs.
In a society with
individuality there are true emotions.
There is love, hate, sorrow, sadness, and tons more emotions I feel
everyday! Sometimes I feel all these
emotions at one time. I love to think my
own thoughts and be my own person, I don’t like when someone tries to tell me
what to do, or how I should do things. In both books the communities are ran by
a higher power, they are all told what to do and what to think. “For a long time we could not speak. Then we said: ‘Such thoughts as these are
forbidden, Golden One’” (Rand 56). They
are taught not to speak in third person, and only to speak in plural. No
individuality at all, what so ever. Neither
Equality nor Jonas were supposed to feel love or care for anybody else. Equality felt something very special for
Liberty he didn’t know it was love but could tell it was special. Without individuality you can’t know a person
as their own person, they wouldn’t have a personality for you to love and
admire, or even to hate.
Equality does NOT exist.
It never will. Everyone is their own person no matter how similar
somebody acts, sounds, or even looks.
Identical twins are the closest to equal as anything, and even they are
different in many ways. In the Giver,
the committee of elders decides everyone’s jobs. If the community was equal, everyone would
have the same jobs, everyone would drive the same vehicles, everyone would
breath the same way at the same time. It
is impossible to have a perfect society, and that’s what I think both authors
are trying to get out of these stories.
They both have a higher power controlling the people in their community,
trying to dumb them all down so that the higher power can stay in control
without any challenges, and by making everybody alike, and having the same
amount of knowledge they would stay on top.
A perfect society is not possible.
If everybody was exactly the same, no one would have
feelings. There would be no fighting, no
violence, and no wars, but what is life without feelings? That means there would be no love, no hate,
no happiness or sadness. So what is
there?? No emotions and no
personalities. But there are pros to
having an equal society. Without love,
there is no hurt, without hate, there are no wars. Not one person is better than another, and
there is no pain and no guilt. In the
story The Giver, Jonas’s dad has a
job where he releases people from the community, nobody knows what release is
really, they just know that once someone is released they never come back and
they are never seen again, but as a Receiver of
Memory, Jonas is aloud to find things out, such as release. “As he continued to watch, the newchild no
longer crying moved his arms and legs in a jerking motion. Then he went limp. His head fell to the side, his eyes half
open. Then he was still” (Lowry 150). Jonas discovers that by releasing someone,
means killing them. He watched his dad
release a newborn child, but to his father it wasn’t bad to him, he had no
emotion, no love, he had no idea that what he was doing was wrong. He had no guilt. He came home acting like nothing happened,
every single day, and Jonas now wonders how he could act so normal after
killing people, just like you or I would look at it, but you and I have
emotion, we feel pain and we feel love, and now so does Jonas, he now feels guilt
and anger. He now feels how we feel.
In the book Anthem,
Ayn Rand informs her readers that The House of Scholars wanted to keep control,
and stay above everyone, and when Equality invents the light bulb they
immediately shut him down, because having somebody smarter than the higher
power will destruct everything the higher power was going for.
Lois Lowry also shows that the community’s higher power
wants everything perfect. Perfection to
them was equality, equality in our society today is impossible, there are
always going to glitches, there is no such thing as perfection, and that’s what
I got out of both books. Being different
is great, we feel love, we feel hate, but when we have both those feelings, and
they become strong and meaningful, things begin to fall apart.
Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1993. Print.
Rand, Ayn. Anthem.Student Edition. New York: Penguin Group, 1961. Print.
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