Hello fellow blog people, Jason Lober here back at it with another one of my blogs on the "Violence in America: Art and Culture". I'm starting to see why it is a lot of people start there own blogs and really become attached to them. This gives any person a great opportunity to get their voice out on the Worldwide Web and talk about the issues they really hold to heart. I enjoy reading and writing these blogs for my class, it has become really handy in my studies as well as a chance to capitalize on the materials that we have been learning about in class.
Today's topic will be on "What were the main issues one had to face during these rough times as a city folk?". In our previous blogs and class lectures, my classmates and I focused on, what seemed to be, never ending famine, greedy and masculinity obsessed railroad owners, murderous actions amongst the civilians of New York City, as well as the wage strikes. We see that, back in that time period, there was a huge competition between the Irish men who refused to work until they received a pay raise and the African Americans who would take their jobs for the same pay the Irish received or even less. Reading closer to the text we have been assigned I've noticed that these are the majority of the main issues in New York at this time, but i also noticed that with every main idea there are extremely important little details that are not necessarily advertised a lot in the book, but are still just as important to the main issues.
We were all assigned one paragraph from the text that we had to critically analyze and compare to the main issues of this text. The passage I was given was about a loveless couple who birthed a young girl with no intentions on loving, caring or even nursing the poor child. In the text, the couple is referred to as a "Unhappy love match" and proceeded to raise the young girl with an ignorant view on city-life, the world and her own existence. The girl eventually grew up, ignorant minded and vulnerable, and set out into the world with no money, no knowledge, and no love for herself or anyone else. In the text she is referred to as a prostitute, selling her body to the savage, love-less men who would pay to sleep with her. She was a lost soul born into a world destined to not have any chance of thriving.
One term used in the text that really jumped out at me was "Tenderly reared". I believe this is referring to the girl being abused by her parents, who didn't even want her in the first place. only when the parents died was she relieved from that abuse, but she is left a hopeless and scarred civilian without any skill or confidence to overcome the odds and make something of herself. I think this really exercises the the lack how New York hit a state of depression even before the Great Depression of the 1920's. The birth and uprising of of a generation that couldn't fend for themselves only made the economy worse and ultimately lead to some of the largest numbers of death, unemployment, and poverty that the New York has ever seen.
Thank you for reading, be sure to catch my next blogs coming up on a weekly basis!
