English 1101
Professor Young
Connections
There are many connections from Elie Wiesel's speech and Rene Steinke's novel Friendswood. Weisel says "It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work. our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair." This reminds me a lot of what happened to Willa. After the rape people looked away. She was sent home from school, to be home schooled, so that the school would not need to 'deal' with her and her 'problems'. Cully's mom found it easiest to turn her head instead of confronting her son about the rape and his drinking problem. Some people remain uninvolved. But by remaining that way, things keep happening.
Wiesel says "Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. As seen in Friendswood, most people looked the other way instead of seeing the real 'Banes Field'; the toxic waste land they want to build houses on to make money from. They pretended nothing was wrong. That the land was cleaned up. But they saw the people. The people dying from the chemicals. Lee was the only one to stand up.
"What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. Similar to the Holocaust, the environmental problems in the town of Friendswood are causing people to suffer. Lee had to watch her only daughter die. She got sicker and sicker everyday. The rest of the town just watched. No one tried to help, not even after her passing. Only Lee.
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