The Rich Don't Care and The Poor Already Live It

Henry David Thoreau was a very good writer. Thoreau is well known ,internationally, for being one of the most talented writers in our county's history. Besides that I really don't know a whole bunch about him, but one thing that I do feel that I know about him, is that he really was born into the wrong social class. To the best of my knowledge Thoreau was born in New England somewhere to a fairly well-off family. He was raised, I'm sure, to the highest that standards allowed back in the day, especially if the setting was in New England. So to say the least, he was brought up in a very prim and proper fashion. I felt that I was able to see this through his writings that we read in class. The passage was titled The Cabin, and it was a story that explained how Thoreau went out into the woods of Massachusetts, to get away from the everyday hustle and bustle of city and just overall modern day life of the time. He spoke all the time throughout the passage about how he hated the industrialization of the world, and how it would lead to the demise of all things good.

I'm gonna have to say that I agree with him on some level, but what I feel that he didn't get was the fact that the people who did have money at that time probably did not care what Thoreau was saying. They were making their money, and for all of history, that's all that has ever mattered, so why would it have been any different back then. Hell, if any thing, they probably would have cared even less in the 1840s, because this was the dawn of the industrial revolution, and there were millions to be made by anybody who had the brains to come up with a half decent invention. So, here's Thoreau writing about how the world needs to regress back to caveman time in the middle of the industrial revolution, and the only people who are going to take a look at his work are the people who can actually read, and they, most likely, will only be people with some money to show; who probably really don't care to take a hand in what Thoreau would like to see happen. The poor on the other hand, who were pretty much anybody that didn't have a nice job in the city, didn't have the money or the scholastic ability to purchase or even read Thoreau's books. Not only that, but they also had already been practicing the life that Thoreau purposely went out and tried to live for a year. So, pretty much the folks from both ends of the spectrum were not going to be giving out any sympathy to Thoreau's views on simplying, simplifying, simplifying.