Essay 2

I think if Elbert Hubbard and Socrates time-travelled to the year 2012 they would not like it very much. Both would probably think that America has become a lazy country. This is because Socrates believed that everyone should ask questions to get to the answer of their original question, or what is also known as the Socratic Method. This ties directly in to what Elbert Hubbard though because he believed that everyone should do as much work as they could. If you are asking questions and following along to all answers you received, you were doing a lot of work. In Elbert Hubbard‘s story, A Message To Garcia, messenger Rowan got a very important letter to the general Garcia. This was during the time of Spanish- American war when letters took a while to deliver. The moral of the story was messenger Rowan did not put off getting this letter to Garcia. Even though he had no idea where he was in hiding, he got the letter to him in no time without asking any questions as to where he was. The story taught that things in life may be difficult for us to do, but if we put things off nothing will get done. People back then did not even think it was important to punctuate or spell correctly even if they were writing a column in the paper, or writing a letter, or whatever the case may have been. People who did their jobs with the smallest amount of work got a bad outcome, but if they did a lot of work, it had a great outcome for their future. In America today, I think people have become lazy. Many people don’t do their jobs the right way, or look for the easy way out of a task. Even in school, if someone has a question, they don’t like the take the steps of asking and answering more questions than needed. Also, so many kids are dropping out of school or are not continuing on to college because they are not trying hard enough and are failing their classes. I believe Socrates and Elbert Hubbard would be ashamed of America today.