In the context of the text, what are the effects of following the crowd? How were the actions
of the Nazi Party, as well as the indifference that the United States showed Jews, examples
of following the crowd? Cite evidence from this text, your own experience, and other
literature, art, or history in your answer.

let's think

what are some attributes about yourself that has changed?

have you had goals that you've been trying to reach, goals you've thrown away?

how do you view your character; what or who has changed it?

what stories do you have about people or things that have changed you?

has religion changed you? an exciting event?

do you believe life has an adventure in store? do you believe it's meaningless?

try to answer questions about yourself.

margaret paston and william paston got married in 1441. as william had to attend business, margaret was in charge of administrating her husband's properties and they communicated each other by letters. they had 7 children.   margery paston, one of those children, had a secret romance with richard calle, the family's bookkeeper and the pastons rejected them, as they tend to get marriage arranged for their children. margery and richard ended up getting married for love, but in secret by the church bishop.

when connie willis was 12 years old, her mother died. in january of 2003, willis was interviewed for locus magazine. she recognized that death is a major issue in her writing, specially because the vacuous and appalling things that people tend to say in order to support you when someone you loved dies. what really saved willis was reading. books, literature, are not false. poetry tells the truth (as dickinson said: "tell al the truth but tell it slant"). it's not a escape from reality, but a nigromantic experience where whe can talk to people that exist no more. that's the definition that connie willis gives in her novel "passage": «(literature) it's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! ». enrique vila-matas has figured out the esence of literary experience when he said in a lecture that he intends to have his revenge against life (and death), because to write (and to read) is a form of living and a way to remember. i like in that sense the idea of not leting anything human to get lost. i feel fiction and poetry as the shapes of an ancient anger. like in the poem from dylan thomas: «do not go gentle into that good night / rage, rage against the dying of the light».

but there is another aspect that i have learned from connie willis's quote. in his famous work "danubio", the italian writer claudio magris describes literature as house removals. some messages reach us, other messages get lost in the labyrinth. those messages which are our inheritance teach us how to live and how to die, how to love and how to hate, how to laugh and how to cry. i think that tales really shape us if we listen to them. maybe through the stories we read we learn how to emphatize with others, knowing that the bells tolls for every each of us.