Equality saw Liberty in a different way then he saw any other person. He felt happy with her and would think about her constantly when they were not together. He also felt fear for her in ways he would not feel for someone else. There is also a great fear that he felt for her that also had to do with him being jealous. “And we thought that we would not let the Golden One be sent to the Palace (Rand 17). All of these feelings revolve around him being in love with her. Love is not just one feeling that you can explain. It is multiple feelings acting together for someone else that all make up the word love.
You can care for something but not fear anything happening to it. You can like your neighbor, but if something happened to him, you would not feel the same type of sadness for someone that lives with you. You could like your friend next door a lot but what makes the feeling different then love is the sexual aspect of the feeling and the intensity of the others. If you care for your friend more than anything in your head and are sexually attracted to him or her, then you are in love. Equality was in love with Liberty because his feelings match that of someone that is in love.
He cared for her very much and feared bad things happening to her. He also wanted to go to the place where they mate with her which meant he also had sexual feelings for her. All this combined made it that he was in love with her. Rebellion In the book Anthem, Equality rebels against the leaders in his world. He stands up to them and leaves to live by himself. Throughout history there have been many times where people have rebelled against a higher power. One of the most well known cases happened in China. One man showed as much courage as Equality did that day when he stood in front of moving tanks.
Fed up by the oppression that the Chinese government showed its citizens, a man decided he has going to stand up and show everyone else not to be afraid to stand up to the Chinese government. He did this without wanting anything out of it except to better other people. “In an act of nonviolent protest, the man, who to this day remains unidentified, calmly walked in front of the procession of tanks” (Storm). With what looked like a normal day while walking to work, the man, with suitcase in hand, walked across the road and stopped in the middle to block the row of tanks from moving forward to suppress protesters.
Eventually he was pulled out of the way but not before making a statement. Both Equality and the Tank Man rebelled against people in higher power in society than them and both could not stop it. They also both made a statement for everyone to see or talk about. Rebellion is not always a bad thing and in anthem it is used as a way to show courage in the same way the tank man had to. Nature When children go to the beach they tend to stay close to land and are always watched by their mothers. Both the mothers and the children do this because they know the water can be dangerous.
This is a sign of respect to nature that humans do without trying. It is the same as what the people do in Equality’s world. In the book, Equality is forced to go into the woods only because he had no other choice. While he was there, however, he learned to not fear it as the rest of the people did but to adapt and use everything in the woods to survive. He hunted birds, cooked with fire, and drank from the running rivers or lakes. Equality didn’t just focused all his time on only surviving but also on looking around and appreciated the surroundings he was in.
Surviving in the woods is a very hard to do but people who do it find a great appreciation for the woods. “The pressures of life in the wild are merely different. Is there enough water? Will the typhoon blow my house down? Are there enough fish in the sea? ” (Fogle). They start appreciating the same place that is difficult to survive as also the place that provides the tools and resources to live. Nature is something that was feared in in Equality’s world as is in our world but in both worlds it has found people that respect it as well.
Optimism Around 1983 when there were people being laid off, many families did not change much of their outside appearances for their families and neighbors. They did what they could even though their major income was gone. “U. S. workers in the early 1980s saw a smaller increase in unemployment than what workers are experiencing today” (Shierholz). They did this because of the trust and hope they had in that the American government was going to do what it could and bring them back out of unemployment. This type of optimism was common back then and can be found all around even today.
When Equality was going to tell the scholars that he had discovered the lightbulb, he had the same type of trust and hope that the people would see what he did was good enough to outweigh the bad. He in the same ad full confidence in the government. Individual Rights Individual rights in anthem was very scarce for everyone except the people on top of the power pyramid. For Equality, all he had was the right to live, breath, sleep and eat but even those last two were forced at certain times of the day.
In society, many people take advantage of other things they consider individual rights. The biggest individual right that we have that Equality didn’t is the right to be free. “One hundred and fifty years ago today, America ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the country” (Roberts). Slavery was a very real thing in US history that saw the rights of blacks taken away very similar to that of Equality. Both were whipped if disobedient and both had a routine that involved eat, sleep, work, and anything else their leaders wanted from them.
