Satires to the extreme

I was going to write this post a while back, but totally forgot about it until now.

Satire:
the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

Last week in my Consumer Economics class we were learning about values. How some people put so much value in money and buy into the whole lie that "money = happiness".
In true Mr. Johnson fashion, we watched a VeggieTales :) Yep. It was great. And it was one of my favorites- Madame Blueberry. Who doesn't like watching a kids show for class work?
It wasn't until later in English when we were talking about satire, that I realized Madame Blueberry was, in fact, a satire. It was using the funny extreme to prove a point of how some of the world has gotten so materialistic.

The very following class period in English we studied satire. But this time it didn't come in the brightly colored, animated, sing along version. It came in the classic piece of writing, A Modest Proposal. In a nut shell, Jonathan Swift published this essay(anonymously) in 1729 when England was so cruelly taking over Ireland and starving the country to death. In graphic detail he makes horrible suggestions of how the Irish should just sell their children for food, among other things. (That's as far as I'll go here...). The satire was that he so boldly ridicules the situation to get people's attention. Our teacher was nervous that she had made a mistake to share it with us, because she didn't want to upset us too much, but it was so cool to see how it had a positive impact on many people in the class, to fire them up to want to make a difference in the injustices that are still occurring.

I had to giggle a bit that night when I thought back on my day. One class I'm singing along to a child's show, and within an hour I'm reading these heavy columns of this potentially traumatic essay. I guess that's what high school is about, eh?
But in both of these I see how effective the use of satire can be (I feel so nerdy posting this...). A Modest Proposal made us walk away with a drive to make a difference in the world and you wouldn't believe how many times I've sang "I thank God for this day, for the sun in the sky, for the love that he gives, and this piece of apple PIE!" this week- continuously reminding me to keep a grateful attitude. They were both so vastly different, but both had the power to make a bit of a difference.
I guess school is good for something ;)