Honoring Our Veterans

Fires begin surrounding, friends lie dead next to you, you look down noticing that only one leg remains. You’re gasping for air, the smoke is thickening, and soon everything around you goes black. Then, awakening in the loud sounds of a helicopter, cruising through the air with people struggling to help save your life. Sadly, this man did not make it. People constantly sacrifice their lives for you every day. Some soldiers survive but end up handicapped for the rest of their life. So when is the right time to honor them? All the time.
Life is short; soldiers are willing to make their lives even shorter so that all of our country can live a more peaceful life. The attitude of how they live involves making life valuable and worth living. Your respect for veterans should be so high because they were willing to die for your protection and they were blessed enough to come back to America alive. All soldiers and veterans have bravery which is such a difficult trait to obtain. “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.” — G.K. Chesterton.
Too many people in our country take things for granted like having a house to live in and having food to eat. Most people spend over three hours each day in front of a computer or a television screen. That is the exact definition of laziness. People need to realize that others are dying for them while they sit there and watch television. Every day you should realize what others do for you, even those that you don’t know. Respect veteran’s courage and take time in your day to appreciate the peaceful life you have, because it goes without saying that if you think your life is hard, a veteran’s life was so much harder. “The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.” — Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

Reflection on the Good Earth

In the novel The Good Earth Wang Lung cannot wrap his head around the idea that he obtains the ability to turn his life around from the tragedy he believes waits ahead of him. People don’t live forever and Wang Lung knows what he wants in life to come; Wang Lung’s vision involves earning enough silver to live a comfortable life. Unlike the House of Hwang, this man wishes to spend his silver carefully rather than carelessly; by forgetting to look at good things on his earth, Wang Lung begins to develop into the person he always feared of becoming.

Women symbolize weakness in this novel, except for O-lan. This woman served as a slave in the House of Hwang and, when she married Wang Lung, O-lan helped him greatly symbolizing a very strong figure. Wang Lung hadn’t thought of her feelings much since she showed almost no emotion with her face always stoic. She announced she would give birth to her child yet O-lan said it as if she was on her way to the house to prepare a meal. “Her hair was still wet with her agony and her narrow eyes were sunken. Beyond this, she was as she always was.” (p. 38) Why were women treated poorly? In response to this, men felt like they needed power resulting in mistreating the women. If Wang Lung would take time to love O-lan for her strong qualities instead of judging her physically, he would end up living life on a much better path.

When Wang Lung got put into O-lan’s shoes, he felt as though getting treated the way he did reached a whole new level of disrespect. His uncle forced him to give him all of his food and Wang Lung has no choice, for his uncle threatens to tell all of the villagers of Wang Lung’s “greed”; yet his uncle must always get his way and talks the village people into coming to take Wang Lung’s minute surplus of food and silver. “If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed.” (p.63) This man lived his life working on the fields; although his work can became a difficult task, it comforted him in a way that he himself could not notice. “It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of his earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon.” (p.35) So Wang Lung learned that he must respect his uncle — one of the most unintelligent people he had ever met — not knowing how to recognize similar behaviors within himself.

The House of Hwang — exactly the opposite of the home of Wang Lung — symbolizes wasteful and greedy people. How did these people get so wealthy? Laborers and slaves began doing all work for the House of Hwang leading to their selfish image. In the House of Hwang, when there is silver, they intend to spend it; in Wang Lung’s home, silver will be stored for a time when it comes in need. “There is a way when the rich are too rich.” (p. 121) Secretly, he admires the extreme wealth of that home. “[M]ore than anything he wished to enter the great house with pride.” (p. 48) Poor men and women are lean and strong from doing their work on the fields whereas the small rich population look fat and lazy — somehow stylish for these Chinese people. As Wang Lung begins to care more about his pride, like the rich, things that should be important in his life become a blur.

“Why are you wasteful? Tea is like eating silver.” (p. 4) This used to have a deep meaning to Wang Lung yet when the cost of tea slipped his mind once, it changed his life forever. A new, extravagant tea shop had gotten built which brought to Wang Lung’s attention that a man who now has extra silver, like himself, needs a much more beautiful woman than O-lan. To his surprise, he can buy one of these dreamy women. Choosing carefully, Wang Lung decides to purchase Lotus. As his interest in her went up, so did his interest in his own image, like as the intake of food goes up, so does the number on the scale. He then buys laborers to do his work for him leaving him with some time just focused on Lotus and other times focused on himself, but too much of the time doing absolutely nothing. “One must eat. I do not care that my foolish belly is growing lazy after all of these days of little to do. It must be fed. I will not die because it does not wish to work.” (p. 93) This sudden change in Lifestyle, seemingly fantastic to Wang Lung, turned his life from going downhill to falling right off of a cliff.

All of Wang Lung’s important values vanished. He no longer worried about saving silver or showing respect, loving Lotus or even caring about his family. “As he had been healed of his sickness of heart when he came from the southern city and comforted by the bitterness he had endured there, so now again Wang Lung was healed of his sickness of love by the good dark earth of his fields and he felt the moist soil on his feet and he smelled the earthy fragrance rising up out of the furrows he turned for the wheat. (p. 214) The essence of Wang Lung’s uncle now appeared in him by controlling others and ordering them to do things for him. His journey from poverty, to owning land, to wealth, to greed leaves his children in the path of overspending and going right back to poverty. This same thing happened to the House of Hwang. One of his children knows he should sell the land so he does not end up like his father. “Now this second son of his seemed more strange to Wang than any of his sons, for even at the wedding day, which came on, he was careful of the money spent…” (p. 317)

Although Wang Lung forgot about his values, he remembered what was important when they were gone from his life, for example, when O-lan died, he regretted insulting her. “All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she made comfort for them all and they had not known it.” (p. 257) Even when he reached death, his land needed to belong to him. His sons felt the urge to rebel against their father who now seemed stupid to them, like how Wang Lung’s uncle used to seem dumb to him. This rebellion was so secretive that he could not see what they planned to do. “But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.” (p. 360)