Let's eat Mr. Potato head!
When my youngest cousin, Eliseo, was born, I made a few strange comments that I'm not necessarily proud of. One of them was calling him, a sack of potatoes. When he was a new born baby, he would sleep and sleep and sleep and do absolutely nothing else. His body was still developing, right before my very own eyes into a fully formed human body, but at the moment he looked like a cute blob. So he was my potato boy. I, somewhat, identify in comparing children to food like in Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal. However, Swift takes the function of turning children into food a step further. Swift wants to take malnourished children and turn them into something useful for the commonwealth. Poor children, predominantly of Catholic origin, are being starved throughout the regions of Ireland. He proposes fattening them up and serving them to the wealthy Irish landowners. Child birthing would become a new job, for all those pregnant women out there. They'd sell their babies into the meat market at the age of one. Yes, some think it's vulgar, but some of the pros that Swift suggests possess positive economic, social, and political value for the Irish common wealth. First, husbands would be nicer to their wives, because now, they'd earn some income on the side for getting pregnant all the time! Second, instead of having to provide for another child, they could just sell the ones they don't like for money. Third, chefs would have an entirely new field of meat to experiment and create recipes for! Fourth, Ireland and its wealthy landowners will become culturally enriched through its new food source, (talk about the tourism its going to bring). Finally,...Obviously, you'd probably value your kids more, because now you get to choose which ones you can sell and which ones you don't have to keep.
Swift's proposal is probably the best solution to history's problems. I mean, why isn't Congress looking to mold their social programs after his model nowadays? The answer to solving Washington's big problems with the economy is right in front of us. Some brilliant master mind thought it up two hundred years ago! All we have to do is change our product. We don't need to shut down the government, all we need to do is to start selling immigrants in the meat markets. And we'd have so many flavors! Asian, Mexican, African, European..You name it..The U.S. has it! That's how our economy's gonna start thriving again. Okay, maybe we have more problems than that and should not take Swifts' proposal literally. I mean, that's probably murder...So... Perhaps we too, should look at our problems more closely, and analyze the state of mind in which we find our ideals and principles of our country, as Swift did when he wrote about the state of his country, Ireland, back then. Swift makes us think about the state of our principles and priorities. How many of us put economic priorities over our priorities for preserving the quality of human life first? We choose cheaper fast food than home-cooked meals because we're lazy and it's cheap. Perhaps, our consequences and choices are not shed in a vulgar light like Swift's proposal for eating children. But the economic choices we make somehow, will eventually, and probably indirectly affect humanity and our value for the standard of living. Everything is connected although it's hard to see. We must look further than simply settle with something at face value.
-Laura Miller
