America's Loneliness
Throughout history, America has been seen as the ideal dream.
Like the characters of the book, the elderly and migrants from outside the U.S. all experience loneliness. This loneliness can take a toll in their life and impede their dreams just as Lennie and George’s dream were prevented because of loneliness in the book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Though it may not affect everyone, it strikes many people today.
The characters in the book all have a sense of loneliness to them. The biggest example is George and Lennie. Lennie starts to hallucinate before being shot by George about how George didn’t want him, that he was just a burden. He could have just moved on with life if it wasn’t for Lennie. I think Lennie hallucinated this because he realized how important it was to have George with him because he knew that it if weren’t for George, he would be lost and friendless.
Curly’s wife was another example. Before being accidentally killed by Lennie, Curly’s wife had talked to Lennie. She said that she likes to talk to people too. She didn’t have any one to talk to and also felt as if she was all by herself. Her mistake was befriending the wrong person.
The last example that I’m going to talk about is candy and his dog. Candy was attached to the dog that he had for a long time. It was his friend and someone close to him. The others in the farm didn’t want it there because it started to smell and it was too old. They all wanted it killed.
When they put it down, Candy was overwhelmed that he had lost the one thing that he cared about. Desperate to find a new friendship, he overheard Lennie and George speaking about the farm that they were going to build. Candy quickly offered them his money to help build it as long as he could be part of it. The Characters in Of Mice and Men experience loneliness and are not all successful to overcome it. The elderly are often neglected and sent to live on their own in nursing homes sometimes to die.
In their perspective, loneliness can be like Candy’s dog that was unwanted by everyone and had to be put down because it was too old. Have we as a nation put the elderly in this burden? When we created nursing homes, I don’t think our intention was to isolate the old from the young. We intended it to be a place where the elderly can live peacefully and quietly not having to worry about life’s antagonizing problems. But just like in Of Mice and Men, to be truly happy is to have the people you love close to you. Lennie wouldn’t have gone far if it wasn’t for his friend George. The elderly are the people who taught us everything.
They came before us and they are the ones who pass things down into our hands. Migrants may come to the United States illegally, but they come to live a new life, a life that they can be proud of. Yet, coming to start this new life has its obstacles. A major one being loneliness. Usually migrants come to the United States with family because they are the ones who make us feel at home and comfortable.
This is where the problem starts. Even though living in an unfamiliar place may make migrants feel lonely, what about being separated from the ones who keep that only sense of home with them. To migrants everywhere, this could be devastating. Every day people are being divided from their relatives. Just as George and Lennie start to work in a new farm, they stick together so they don’t feel by themselves. What if Lennie was separated from George? Lennie probably wouldn’t make it one day and would feel abandoned.
Just as Lennie and George found it important to stick together, Migrant families find it essential to stay together to feel secure. Loneliness affects us all even if were old, young, from this country, or not. The book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck shows us how it affects us by demonstrating it on his characters of all types of backgrounds. America is a place of opportunity, not a place that condemns us to loneliness. just because it affects us doesn’t mean we can overcome it.
