Stowe

I really liked this reading. I think that it makes people think about freedom from a side that we too often forget. Is freedom really free? I think here we see that it is nowhere close to free. It is actually very "expensive" or "costly".

I think that this story did a great job at capturing things that most stories like this often leave off. The idea of gender roles was seen and discussed. (Fetching wood chips) Also in the first part when the mother gives up everything. Is this taken literally or just an image? Either way i feel the point is still the same, i feel like we are to see that it is not an easy path. We must give up and lose things in order to get what we want. Even then it is still not promised. I feel like this first part was fun to read and made me think a lot about where i am today and being thankful for what i do have as well as what i do not have.

I think another important issue that we overlook is the power and idea of liberty back when this was written. What do we place importance on now in days? Is liberty truly important to us? I feel like these people early in history worked so hard to create the very government we have today and yet most people have no interest or knowledge of it. But they are all willing to complain when someone is not doing something the way "they would do it". I think that today’s society and especially the youth do not care about these issues like we should. If we did more people would vote in elections and speak up when they did not believe in what was going on. So i feel like we can see a definite change in values with the change in time.

The second part of this reading was talking about slavery and how looking back what it makes us look like. Now in days we would think the idea of selling a man is dumb. (Although to some degree it still happens, and for other reason such as sex) But for the most part we like to think that we are not this and this was such a bad time for the slaves in our history. The truth is it was a part of our culture. At the time it was not seen by everyone or by government to be wrong. It ended up hurting everyone that was involved, not just the slave. People were forever changed by this, history was forever changed. When we hear the story of the runaway slave in the second part, we can only imagine what it must have felt like. Times were hard and people were a different kind.

One question that i have and that i continue to think about, even if it might be a risky question, is how much have we really changed? Are there still slaves today? Not to the degree of back then but it does still happen. What about the men and women today being sold for their bodies or them selling their own bodies for sex? Is this still a form of slavery?

I think that we have learned a lot from our history, but i think that we will soon be repeating some of it because we did not take action. We allowed things to keep going, we do not stand up and fight for things we know to be true and honest. We go with the flow; most of us have become followers. Who will be a leader?