Bob Ewell Arrogance

The year of 1960 marked not only a turn in the decade, but a turn in culture. The american people elected the young democrat John F. Kennedy in the height of the Cold War. Tensions were rising, and ideologies clashed between the superpowers. Yet somehow, JFK never played on anti-communist fervor, at least not as much as Eisenhower. He never spent his speeches slamming Kruschev or fueling rage. Instead, he took the route of hopefulness and, until the Cuban Missile Crisis, never sponsored brinksmanship. Despite the fear and the harsh reality of nuclear weapons, he summed up his philosophy when he stated: “forgive your enemies, but never forget their names”. At the time, the radicals were no longer the bitter left nor the bitter right, but the
Not only does close-mindedness breed arrogance since it presents you as a perfect being and others not, but it can potentially blind people from reality in convoluted ways. For example, take Bob Ewell, the head of the Ewell family. While being questioned in the trial of Tom Robinson, Bob Ewell states that the African Americans are “dangerous to live around” and “devalun’ my property” (234). His accusations of African Americans to be dangerous are not founded within experience, but only because his father and his father before that told him so. Racism is the result of misunderstanding and people never taking the time to understand other cultures and what hardships they’ve been through. In a closed mind, only the troubles of yourself matter, and never the plights of others. He accuses them of devaluing his shabby shack rather than a result of his lifestyle, an unemployed, poor man who chooses to live off welfare rather than working. Never has he stepped back and take an objective view of himself or others, and as a result, he and his children has a blatant disregard for others. When his pride was in question, Bob’s son Burris yelled at his teacher that she is a “snot-nosed slut of a schoolteacher” and she “ain’t makin’ me go nowhere” (37). If he were to realize that she was only trying to help