Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.
The author points out that most people value animals, working animals lives, over the lives of poor older women.
All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny.
The word "mummified" is interesting. Because of all the time spent in the sun, the skin is all shriveled and leathery. Could also imply how close they are to being mummies (dying) themselves.
All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.
People see the final product, but don't take into account the extremely hard, laborious work that went into it. Instead, the white man reaped the benefits, all the money and wealth from the final product, not truly deserved like the working man.
They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.
This is really sad to think about. Making these colored people inhuman. It's really powerful wording that shows how little value many people viewed colored people
Are they really the same flesh as yourself?
I think this line really adds to the fact that the white man did not value other races to be equal with himself. Colored flesh determined class in many white men's eyes.
when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.
Reminds me of ourselves. We don't notice the changes in ourselves as we get older, because it's a gradual change. Then when you really think about it, certain memories seem to have happened longer ago than the last time you reveled that memory. People may say "you've changed" and you may not see it in yourself right away.
There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck.
It seems a lot of people in our country is feeling stuck and divided over the travel ban, refugees, and Trump's presidency. It's kind of crazy how stuck the nation feels right now, as well as the fights people are facing internally.
terra incognita
ter·ra in·cog·ni·ta
noun unknown or unexplored territory.
Adrienne Rich
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/adrienne-rich
Virginia Woolf
Hope
noun 1.a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. 2.a feeling of trust.
verb 1.want something to happen or be the case.
“We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”
I find it interesting how true this can be. It's a roller coaster of emotions. People feel hopeful and positive one moment, and then down and negative the next. Our emotions shape who we are, how we act.