Letter from Birmingham Jail and The perils of Indifference

The speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Elie Wiesel are very much discussing similar topics. Both poems mention the injustices that humanity causes towards people that are assumed to be infereer to others. Martin Luther King Jr. and Wiesel both experience extreme injustices during their lives. Martin Luther King Jr. experienced the harsh reality of segregation here in the United States while Wiesel experienced the consentration camps of Nazi Germany. These men with the sharing of their expriences have help to improve the life of humans that are thought to be less then humanbeings.

In Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech he is imploring people to stand up and fight a nonviolent fight against the injustices of segregation. He discusses how with nonviolent protests that eventually the government will have no choice but to listen to the millions that feel the inhuman way black people were treated was wrong and needed changing. Another thing that Martin Luther King Jr. discussed was how the people that seem to be good and wanting to help had actually been hindering the civil right movement with there procrastination. He believed that when these "good people" said to just wait that in time things would change that they were creating a bigger problem, he felt that the time was now and only now could things change. With his powerful speeches and letters he helped to be one of those who helped to change the way all minorities were treated here in the United States.

Wiesel discusses inhumanities in the world, such as what he experienced in the consentration camps in Germany during World War II. In his speech he mentions the dispear that caused many in the consentraion camps to give up, they could not feel hunger, thirst, or pain because their dispear was so great. Weisel also says during that time their worse fear was that God would abandon them. One thing that Weisel mentions that was a horrifing fact was that when the people in the consentration camps believed that the freeworld had know idea that these attrocities were accuring, but actually the freeworld did know and held off on trying save these people from the inhuman actions of the Nazi's. This is were he mentions how indifference is the greatest evil.

In Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail he discusses how the silence of people is what can cause the most problems when you are trying to stop injustices. Weisel mentions in his The Perils of Indifference that indifference is the greatest evil when inhumane attrocities occur. I believe that both these men are right. When people are silent they in their own way are being indifferent. They believe that when they keep silent that the problems will not effect them and they are left out of the problem. When one choses to be indifferent they are chosing to create more problems by making the inhuman activities worse. An indifferent person and action makes other people feel that they are less than human to those who are indifferent. In reality both these concepts work hand in hand an indifferent person can chose to be silent while a silent person can chose to be indifferent. When both these issues are used great problems can occur and the only way to change this is to teach people to speak up and not show indifference to others to make this change. Unfortunately even though we have progressed so much as a society we still see similar attrocities through out the world that we saw in the past. We as a world society need to stop tolerating these actions and create the change to make all humans feel like they are humans and not animals or pieces of garbage.

What does critical thinking means to me....

Critical thinking is not really something that I have spent to much time thinking about. I generally am a very logical thinker. If things don't make sense I have a hard time changing my thinking to make it make sense. I really don't see how breaking things that I read down and analyzing them is something that I use on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong I do read and I actually love to read but analyzing everything that I read down seems to take some of the fun out of just sitting back and reading a book for fun. Since I don't generally think critically I am not sure at what kind of techniques that I use. The only thing that I really analyze is politics. I think it is very important to understand fully what our government is trying to do with our country. I do analyze what politicians say and do and I will read and study a bill before I vote on it. Other than that I really don't analyze things to much. I find that life is much funner when you just live. By analyzing everything you take life out of living.

I am hoping that in this class I can change some of the way I think. There are some areas in life that one should think critically and I don't think that way now so hopefully I will soon be able to think differently. I am looking forward to the challenge that awaits me in learning a new way to think.