Innocence: Three Essays About Ourselves

Innocence, it's something we're all born with, but what does it mean to be innocent? Merriam-Webster defines innocence as "freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil." In seemingly unrelated essays, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Eric Schlosser, and Nora Ephron show us how innocence is something we all have, and try to protect.

In her essay, "The Story of My Body", University of Georgia professor Judith Ortiz Cofer, shows us how easily our experiences can affect our innocence. A Puerto Rican native, Cofer was only a young girl when she had her "first experience" with "color prejudice." Things like prejudice are what take away our innocence. You can no longer be unacquainted with evil when you are "born a white girl" but become "a brown girl." Her experience with a racist butcher further exposes her innocence. The butcher doesn't see a blameless young girl, but instead, a kid with "dirty hands" who may be trying to rob him. His words make the author examine her hands for herself; she exposes herself to guilt for doing nothing wrong. Luckily her innocence proved to be it's own defence. She realized her hands were clean. The real sin was with the man "in the stained apron." So sometimes we lose our purity through our experiences, but sometimes we keep it.

In "What We Eat", by National Magazine Award winner Eric Schlosser, we gain insight into how the masses protect their innocence when big conglomerate's "obliterate regional differences." He shows us how easy it is to stay innocent when you're only one among millions. There is simply no way that one person can be responsible for the growth of "about one thousand" McDonald's in 1968, to "about thirty thousand restaurants" today. We try to preserve our innocence by being anonymous. Ignorance can also give us the protection we need from guilt. When you're getting a cheeseburger you don't see yourself as "wiping out small businesses." You don't feel guilty when a Mom and Pop store closes because you stopped shopping there long ago. Finally, he shows us how we protect our innocence by placing the blame somewhere else entirely. It's not our fault if we don't shop locally, after all, "an instinct to avoid the unknown" actually makes us mistrust the small local stores. We feel safer knowing that our brands "products are always and everywhere the same." In the end our innocence is safe behind a smoke screen of millions of other people, we never consider that we could be at fault.

Finally, Esquire magazine senior editor Nora Ephron shows us how people defend their innocence from the perceived evil of death, in her essay "The Boston Photographs." It centers around newspapers printing photographs of a young woman falling to her death, and the criticism they generated from the public. People from around the world sent in letters about the pictures. Most of the letters expressed anger at the newspapers for showing "a human being in terror of imminent death." The majority of the people were trying to stay unacquainted with this evil fate by telling the newspapers not to print pictures of it. Pictures bring the reality too close to home; these were "pictures of death in action." We feel better when we can imagine things as far away and not happening to us. What shows most clearly the defence of people's innocence is something the author talks about specifically: "the death of the woman." People tend to think of death as a form of evil, especially death at a young age. If the woman had lived there would have been nothing to defend against; no evil to stay unacquainted with. The implication of evil in the pictures was enough for people's innocence to seek shelter; to write letters saying I want to see no more.

I believe life is a difficult journey and it's only natural that we want to stay free of guilt and sin. Nobody wants to think they are putting others out of business, or think their hands are "dirty", or be reminded of our own mortality. These three essays may seem to be different, but they can give us insight into parts of our own humanity.

Respect: Hope for a Global Society

How many times did your parents tell you to respect your elders, or respect other people's beliefs? It seems like my mom was always telling me to respect something. Cornell West, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Kofi Annan, three people worlds apart from one another, are also telling us how important respect is to all of us.

In his essay "Moral obligations of a democratic society" Cornell West highlights the importance of respect, not as it applies to children and their elders, but as a cornerstone of democracy. From the moment we're born we all seek respect, we enter into a "struggle for decency and dignity." The whole journey from childhood to adulthood is about earning our right to be, to justify our own existence. Once that journey is over we have usually gained the respect we seek, if not we keep trying. We do not look for this justification only from ourselves but from our society, and consequently society looks for it from us. It is a two lane street. When this give and take relationship stops working, society stops working, for according to West, "the roots of democracy are fundamentally grounded in mutual respect." Democracy is threatened when the members of society lose respect for each other. Can you add to the growth of a nation if you're too busy judging or blaming people you don't know? Or how productive can you be when society looks at you as someone not fit to be there? I don't respect democracy because it wants me too, I respect other people because I want democracy.

In "No Name Woman" Maxine Hong Kingston shows us the importance of respect by describing the horrors that result from not having any. The authors aunt(pregnant but not by her husband) is driven to suicide by the humiliating and devastating judgement her village passes on her. Rather than seeing a woman, with respect, in need the villagers view her as a disgrace. The morning after her home is destroyed the aunt kills herself and her newborn. Kingston speculates on this story's beginning. First that "woman in the old China did not choose", leading us to believe that the aunt may have been raped. There is no more horrible form of disrespect. The second that the Aunt may have succumb to vanity, and deliberately sought out the attentions of someone else. In this case it is the aunt who disrespects the villagers first. She knowingly disregards the good of the village by seeking out an extramarital affair, a grave sin in her time and place.

Kofi Anan really focuses on the importance of respect in "Nobel Lecture". He mentions a girl born in Afghanistan and the life she has. This life will be lived in a way that most people "would consider inhuman." Part of that inhumanity is that she may never be seen as an equal. The dignity and respect granted to people in other parts of the world may be an idea she only ever hears about. Expounding even further on the importance of respect he talks about human kinds turbulent history. When people stop seeing each other as equals than our past has shown us that violence quickly follows. He drives this point home with a powerful message, "...genocide begins with the killing of one man..." One of our greatest strengths has been to embrace the differences in people as part of their value. Our world becomes more diverse every day and it's only because of our differences that we can keep moving forward. After all once you stop growing you start dying.

I am glad my parents taught me about respect. Their lessons laid the ground work for my entry into an ever changing society. I hope the lessons people like Kingston, West, and Annan teach us will find an even broader audience and have a more profound impact on our future.