Close your eyes, and imagine this scene; in front of you is your baby, the one your extremely proud of and love very much. Then all of the sudden, a man you don’t know snatches them away and kills them with an injection of venom. Horrible, isn’t it? Well, that’s what they do to the elderly and babies in The Giver that don’t meet standards. They “release” them, basically killing them. Release is something that these people think nothing about, yet it’s the most horrible thing in the community. The people in The Giver are fortunate to be ignorant of this horrible process.
The people in the Giver are brainwashed to think that release is a celebration, that the Old enjoy going away from their wonderful community where they grew up and worked their entire life. The people think it’s the only way to keep the population intact. If they didn’t then they also would have to go through many Ceremonies to mourn their dead, because if someone dies accidently, there’s a ceremony to remember them, then they forget about them forever.
But these people don’t know, and the people who do know don’t care. That’s because these people are shallow, only caring about the tiny things they feel. They don’t feel anger, they only feel mere exasperation. They don’t feel sad. Jonas knows this because he has felt real sadness. Pain, terror, all these feelings that were taken away from the community. Even though these terrible feelings don’t make us feel any better here, I believe it keeps us feeling fortunate that we have so little of them here in the U.S.
All in all, taking feelings away from the people and keeping death out of the equation by killing them in advance is a bad idea. It keeps these people shielded from the real world that they could learn so much from. I think that’s why Jonas left. Because he had feelings. For Gabriel, and anxiety to get to a better place.
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