"In the pursuit of virtue, don't be afraid to overtake your teacher."
"Young people should not be taken lightly. How do you know that they will not one day be better than you are now?"

--Confucius

"True poets are only the interpreters of the Gods."

-- Socrates

You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because you're the same.


Sunday, December 18, 2011

The Help Theme Essay

You find yourself talking to the same people, day after day, trapped inside their bubble of conformity.  Somehow, you still pray that something will be able to break you out and set you free into the world.  Nothing changes and you feel like an innocent prisoner locked up in a jail with no way out.  Every person in your life has taught you to be proper, judgmental, pretty, and segregated from outsiders; blacks, misfits, anyone who doesn't belong.  In the book, The Help, Miss Skeeter found her hidden key to break out of her jail and escape onto a difficult road of accomplishment and opportunity.  A road that lead her to discover the importance of true friends.

The novel, The Help, has many themes, but I think that the most important is the importance of friends.   Three white ladies have been best friends for years, but are now reevaluating their friendship.   Miss Skeeter, starts to learn that, while some people not be as privileged as you, they will still make great friends.  Once Miss Skeeter's other friends found out that she had befriended these outcasts, they began excluding her.  I would agree with Miss Skeeter, because I also think that true friends are more important than popular friends. 

In the book/movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry is basically offered a chance to become friends with Draco Malfoy.  Harry understands that Hermione and Ron are his true friends and tells Draco, "I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks."  Miss Skeeter originally felt awkward around the maids, but later said, "It wasn't too long before I seen something inside of me had changed."

The Help, is a lot like life today; it is important to make true friends, not brainwashed, plastic ones.  Any living person can go through life living conformed, popular, and arrogantly, but how much fun would life be if everyone was "perfect"?   Skeeter's and Miss Hilly's friendship began, “With other people, Hilly hands out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt, but it's our own silent agreement, this strict honesty, perhaps the one thing that has kept us friends”, but once Miss Hilly found out Miss Skeeter made friends with coloreds, she went on to say, "And you call yourself a Christian."  A maid in the book said,  “Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, 'Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?', which made me think how enjoyable life could be if everyone was different, but accepting.  Overall, I think that even though The Help took place decades ago, the true meaning of real friends hasn't changed.

The true meaning of friendship was an important theme in The Help and I think that it relates to several other book themes and even real life.   Also, I think that this theme is important to illustrate to people living today; if everyone accepted who they were and what they were meant to be, we would be that much closer to living in a perfect world.  What you do if you heard of someone getting excluded from life for being different?  What if you could accept that one person as a friend?  This is the lesson I got out of The Help.

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