All of the books weve read this semester have been criticisms of America at some point in history: The Scarlet Letter brought light upon fallacies in Puritan society, The Crucible showed us the flaws in Puritan society and during the Red Scare, Frederick Douglass exposed us to the reality of slavery and racism before the Civil War, Huckleberry Finn poked fun at the ignorance of uneducated racists, The Catcher in the Rye emphasized the "cheesy-ness" of the 1900s, and MacNolia slapped us in the face with a real look at racism in America through the eyes of a black girl growing older. That's quite a list there, and I'd say weve been taken through a pretty good chunk of American cultural history just through reading all of these novels.
Reading all of this cultural criticism and satire got me thinking about the flaws of today's society. I know we're not perfect - America is full of capitalists, elitists, and racists, just to name a few. We might not be as religiously oppressive as the Puritans, but there are still religious battles fought today, sometimes violent ones. We abolished slavery and experienced the Civil Rights movement, but that doesn't mean that race isn't an issue, and it certainly doesn't mean that other types of oppression don't exist today. While we've been reading about imperfections in American culture of the past, we should also stop to realize all of the imperfections in today's world.
This is why I truly hope that future writers will write about us, that in a hundred years English classes will be reading about the flaws in our culture, just as we are doing right now. Our world is not perfect, and it most likely never will be. Criticism in the form of literature should last as long as this world does to open humanity's eyes to the mistakes of their ancestors and make future generations analyze the flaws in their own lives.
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