Brendan Walsh

Ms. Parham
Honors World Literature III

12/15/13

Social Expectations and Responsibilities

            Everyday most humans go through their lives in a robot like routine. Humans generally trend to do what other around them do and rarely differ from the path. For each role in society comes a social responsibility. For example the social responsibility you have to your siblings is to love them and help them always. This is unrealistic because not everyone has the same past and lives the same present.  It is unrealistic to expect people to conform to social expectations and social responsibilities due to everyone living in a different situation.

The Bluest Eye contains many good example of how social expectations are unrealistic. Pecola really proves that social expectations and responsibilities are farfetched. Social responsibility to your community means helping out your neighbors. Social responsibility to your school means taking care of your education and helping student’s around you. How could Pecola be expected to conform to these standards? She lives in a community that pities her and attends a school that ridicules her. Social expectations to your race could include defending it or speaking good words about it. Pecola and her neighbors did the opposite. They tried to embrace a whole new culture. Pecola wanted to be white and her community unknowingly despised being black. Responsibilities and expectations to society are absurd because of the wide range of people in the world.

In the Nazi propaganda speech he told the German people that they were united. He spoke for everyone and said they want full-fledged war and that they won’t stop till they reach victory. This put many Germans in bad situations. By making this speech it laid a heavy expectation on the German people by their government. The expectation that was created was that everyone must support the war effort. If a citizen were to deny funds towards the war or to refuse government proposals they would likely be charged with treason or another crime. The responsibility set on German citizens is unrealistic because not everyone supports the war effort to the same degree as the Nazi Brass running the war.

Everybody makes different decisions based on the situation they are in. When one thing is expected from everybody it is impossible. How could somebody be expected to be a good citizen when they have been mistreated and had their money used by a corrupt government. Somebody who has not faced corruption would likely question the person but they would never understand because they are in a very different situation. This example only represents responsibility to government but this same lesson can be applied to any social expectation. If we know that expectations like these are impossible to follow why do we continue to enforce the ideas of them?