Ragtime's Over and Done With

So, I finished Ragtime as part of our assignment over the weekend, and here are a few things that I found interesting.

Pg. 263 -- Comparison between the two children

I would just post the entire section, but it's a little long, so I'll just go ahead and discuss it. Basically, it details all of the situations the little girl has been in and the ones that the little boy has never experienced. I just liked the comparison, showing how one child has seen the world and how the other has, and the little girl is so young that it's shocking to see what's she been through lately. Not too far before this particular scene is the one where they are burying each other, and it was also shocking how they exaggerrated certain parts of each other's bodies in the sand... I mean, they're little kids. And already they're being manipulated by society in sexual terms. I don't know why it seemed so important to me, but it must be a sort of commentary on society. Evelyn Nesbit has been out of the picture for some time now, but it was the same situation for her. Her body was exploited, and little to no attention was given to who she actually was. However, she was an adult, and she probably could have made some changes in her life to avoid being objectified. But these kids... Already they're being built into a sort of adult prototype that's expected for the time period.

Pg. 277 -- "The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer."

There are a few points here that I would like to make. First of all, why is she referred to as "Red Emma" when the color red obviously references Communism rather than anarchism? I thought that was a little funny, and it may in fact be an allusion to how ignorant society was toward other systems of government at that time. I mean, the economy was pretty good at the time with all the new technologies and services coming about, so why would anyone even want to know about Communism or anarchism? Just seemed funny. Also, I liked the mention of how harmful wealth can be for some individuals and the impact it can have on others who don't have it. Pretty much the same concept that I think we face today... Greed is a big motivator, and it can cause some people to trample on others in their journey to attain wealth. If you think about it, Coalhouse Walker suffers at the hands of wealth because the white people around him cannot accept that he, a black man, can have it when they cannot. So, they ruin his car. "Red Emma" is disgusted with the capitalistic system and its greed for wealth, so her entire platform is to get rid of it through anarchism. Father is so preoccupied with his business that he doesn't even know his son, and he certainly doesn't know his wife anymore.

I guess that's it.