Strongly-Spoken Satirist

Swift's essay, "A Modest Proposal", was a strong statement of the social injustices of the destitute Irish Catholics of the time and the treatment of them by English high brows. I happen to love satire and I was also familiar with this piece from a brief reading we did, I think, in high school. I could be mistaken. The point being, I was familiar with it and I appreciated the voice he gives his essay even more now that I've read many other works since then and have learned a great deal about society and its classes, injustices and the system as a whole. When reading this, I can really hear his voice speaking. It's not just words on a page, it's a man telling the people of his time, and now, us, to wake up and to realize how we treat people less fortunate than the majority. With our audience today, I think this essay is easily applicable to our standards. Let's look at the way we treat our poor sometimes. Pretty rotten. That's not to say that there isn't a good amount of people and organizations out there to improve the lives of many, it's just that is the relatively small percentage of the population that scoffs the lower-class. But every once in a while there is hope and that hope may manifest in a variety of forms. With today's changing social norms and crises of all sorts we have voices of reason and warning, and in the case of Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite satirists, strong views conveyed by biting satire. In this case, it manifested in Swift. Too bad they were all too stubborn to listen to him. He was rather clever.