Blog 2

"'One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions."

I'm not sure if Atticus meant to call 1935 "the year of grace". It's a weird word choice. I'm not sure if grace is the right word to describe the year when the dust bowl was at its peak, the strongest hurricane to ever hit the US hit, and the repercussions of the Great Depression 6 years before were still in full effect. While there were many natural disasters, also many laws were passed in 1935, such as the New Deal/WPA, National Labor Relations act, the Social Security Act, and many more. Laws aren't usually passed without a backlash, debate, or tension. Atticus is the speaker here, and he is saying this in his closing remarks in the Ewell/Robinson trial. He is addressing everyone, and I imagine that the room is quiet with anticipation.

The thing that was wrong about this is not that this wasn't true about 1935, but that it was. This is a good representation of how it was in 1935, whether people liked it or not. The fact is that people were not created equal, then or now. Not everyone has the same opportunities to be successful as everyone else, whether that be trying to make a clock for a science project but being accused of it being a bomb, or being supposedly shot because of a misdemeanor but really because of the color of your skin. Not everyone is created equal.

What should've, but obviously didn't, happen is that no one has any type of bias in their life and everyone treats everyone how they want to be treated. We still have an awfully long way to go in both regards.