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Civil Liberties In A Mother's Freedom March

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Such relief is short lived. As “[t]he mother smiled to know her child / Was in the sacred place, … that smile was the last smile / To come upon her face. / For when she heard the explosion, / Her eyes grew wet and wild. / She raced through the streets of Birmingham / Calling for her child” (728). This mother’s knowledge of how the church and norm were safe are shattered with the bombing of the very church she sent her child off to. As soon as she heard the explosion, she realizes what happened, and races through the street with crazed and teary eyes. Yet, she is not fully cognizant of the result of her decision being the death of her child, but her choice ultimately ends up not having mattered. While her concerns of her daughter's safety were …show more content…
This allows for Randall to advance that while choices may not ultimately change the fact that one will die, there can be a result from those choices that prevents people from suffering in the way those before them did. Here, had the girl gone participated in the Freedom March, attempting to help liberate her people, rather than with the safe and well-trodden path her mother favored, her likely death would have been part of many in a group fighting for the end of the racial violence that was to end her. He does not pretend as though this possibility of death for a cause justifies treating death as a means to an end, however. The mother’s initial sadness and following grief communicates to the reader that death is never accepted if it can be avoided, because the end of a life never matters for only one …show more content…
“[T]he endings are all the same however you slice it … The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die. So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs … favor the stretch in between, since it is the hardest to do anything with” (291). The speaker here forces the reader to not think about how interesting a beginning can be, and instead how the ending will happen regardless. Whether there is any love at all, or mutual love and tradition, at the end of their life people die. The only authentic ending is to realize this, and also to realize that beginnings are fun, because there are more possibilities than can be imagined. If one truly wants to analyze life, one must look at the choices made in someone’s life, and appreciate them as a connoisseur. Yet, as all endings are the same, each choice only brings one closer to the end, no matter how different the situations or choices made are. Very little can be done with what is in between a beginning and end of a life. At the beginning, one can imagine all the possibilities. However, as one continues towards death, there are less and less possibilities of how to get to the ultimate inevitability of death. Atwood’s conclusion of life “seem[s] to support the idea that an ending

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