Blog #5 (Emailed to your because blog didnt work for me but i just got it to work)

The rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man’s labor, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former; … the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by laboring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully.

—Jonathan Swift on British life, in Gulliver’s Travels

                Three years after Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, he created the Modest Proposal that exceeded 18 pages.  This satire was able to capture voice of a disinterested citizen and the struggles of living in the 1700s in Ireland.  Swifts story vividly describes poverty and the inability to sustain a family with the abundance of children.  He comically suggests that parents should turn their children into cash crops and sell them for meat to the rich.  At this time the English were in control and but obviously there were more Irish then English creating an unstable social class.  The rich saw the poor as a burden and wanted to get rid of them rather than help them. 

                I began to read this story with a very serious approach.  As I got further and further into the story I was rather confused and disturbed as to why Swift suggested eating children.  Learning that Swift was a priest was shocking because I thought that he was insane. I could not possibly believe that any human being would suggest others to eat children in the effort to reduce poverty to improve the economy, (Reminded me of the walking dead).  But after Professor Harris revealed the deeper meaning, Swifts proposal made logic sense in a sick way.  Swift was able to capture the reader’s attention by making up these crazy scenarios but was also able to raise awareness