Eating Babies

In Johnathan Swifts, “A Modest Proposal” he suggests the one of the most horrific things to his country, or kingdom. He proposes that young infants should be used as nourishment for the human body. Yes, this man is sick, he says that we should eat babies, along with other things such as their flesh could be used as clothes. Johnathan Swift presents a rather sickening idea, but he has points behind his proposal to help fix the countries issues, such as poor families.

When reading this article, an individual will not believe what they are reading. When looked into detail, its actually not the worse idea in the world. He believes that using babies as animals would increase the country in trade and wealth. When looked at it, thousands of babies are born each day, and also thousands of dollars are spent while nourishing this child into a young adult. Instead of spending this money on raising it, they should just be sold to the market for advancements in wealth.

Swift also provides examples in the proposal of how men will look at their significant other more productively. Women today always complain about so many things, such as they should have more responsibility then just sitting at home and raising a child, while the man goes off to work to provide for the family. Woman crave attention from their significant other, and since all women will have to do is sit at home a have babies to help provide more financial wealth for the family, the man will be more eager to pay attention and help the woman through her pregnancy. The woman gets a sense of doing a work for the family and she gets the attention that she wants from the man.

Through this process, Swift shows that cannibalism can be the answer to many things. The way that I interpreted the proposal was that a country should use the certain resources that have been provided for them through nature. What kind of things as a country should we use to make ourselves more wealthy? This proposal was more of a political issue. The United States has free resources that we don’t fully take advantage of. One example would be our oil reserves; oil is one of the biggest trade deals in the world, and when we trade it can affect gas prices. Granted if we did tap into our own oil reserves, we would still have to pay a good price for oil and, but that would ultimately decrease our national debt.

Johnathon Swift is a crazy man, but at the same time has very many strong points to his proposal. Eating babies can be a metaphor to so many different things in the world today. While this article was disturbing, it had more meaning behind it. As a country, and as individuals, we should take advantages of the things that nature has provided us for survival in this world. The world is cruel enough, and sick enough to promote the sanction of devouring babies, but the way Johnathon Swift uses cannibalism in his proposal, it shows how bad we look at particular ideas that involve change to our country.    

Work Cited

Swift, Johnathon, and Leonard Baskin. 1969. A Modest Proposal. New York: Grossman.