To Kill A Mockingbird

I finally was able to read the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee the other day. I do not know quite what I was expecting it to be like, but it drew me in so that I could hardly put it down once I picked it up. The main theme of the book was the prejudices that people have against those who are different from themselves. The town in the middle of Alabama during the 1930's was segregated into the "respectable" white part of town and the part in which the "negros" were kept. The whites looked upon the blacks as being far beneath them and hardly worth their time to associate with. They thought of them as being completely immoral, dirty liers, and criminals who could not be trusted with much of anything. This world is the one in which Atticus and his two kids, Scout and Jem, lived and in which they had to face the town's bigotry, and sometimes their own. One part of the book that really stood out to me was when Scout, the little girl, was in school and they were studying current events, including Hitler's treatment of the Jews. Her teacher was saying how awful it was that he would label his fellow human beings, put them into "ghettos," and treat them as being beneath himself. The irony and hypocracy of the situation was that the teacher, and pretty much the whole town, were doing almost exactly the same thing they were condemning. It reminds me of the verse in Matthew 7:3-5 where it says

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." (NIV)

This book was not only about prejudice, but also very much about the hypocrisy that often accompanies that prejudice. To complain about another's bigotry and mistreatment, such as Hitler's, and then to go on in one's daily life refusing to acknowledge another race of human beings as equal to oneself is completely wrong. However, I think that many of us do this very same thing without realizing it. It may not be prejudice/bigotry against other racial groups in particular, but there are many other things that we do ourselves, sometimes unconciously, that we complain about others doing. We need to first change ourselves before we can honestly talk to others about their problems. This book has become one of my favorites and I cannot wait to have the chance to read it again. It contains timeless lessons that we could all stand to learn.