No Witchcraft for Sale by Doris Lessing

How’s your bank account been lately? If you check your bank account summary right now and if it’s not below a hundred dollars, do you consider yourself rich or poor? When we think about the word rich the first things that come to our mind is celebrities, presidents of anything important or businesses. When we think about the word poor first things that come to our mind is the people who live on the streets, a foreign country, or single parents. Who doesn't want to be known as a rich person? There are the categories of rich and poor for a reason. In modern society, greed impacts the way we live and think. Greed is craving things, but never being satisfied; it manifests in our society as the gap between rich and poor.
Slavery has been around since 1619 which is when the African Americans came to America. The Africans were used to do the hard labor for the Americans. The slaveholders were considered rich while the slaves were considered poor. In the book “No Witchcraft for Sale” by Doris Lessing, African’s in Rhodesia were controlled by the English, forcing them to work as servants. Gideon an African servant to the Farquars and he enjoyed his job. He had a strong bond with them as if he was part of the family. The Farquar’s have a son named Teddy, he was the only child. Teddy was playing outside and encountered a poisonous snake. The snake spit venom in his eyes, luckily Gideon knew of a plant that could cure the boy. After the incident, "Mr. Farquar began explaining how a useful medicine could be made out of root, and how it could be put on sale...?" (Lessing 1121). Gideon was not willing to say where the plant was because he knew the consequences that would come if the English knew about the plant. The thought that came to his mind...

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...ds money to survive with food, shelter, and health. Corporations cannot exist without our greed. They make money from us wanting the new things that become popular in modern society. We crave what the rich have while we want the kindness of the poor. Greed is being never satisfied with what we have and we crave what others have; the gap between rich and poor is what balances greed in modern society.

Works Cited

Buchheit, Paul. "How Corporate Greed Is Starving Our Public School System." AlterNet. N.p., 16 June 2014. Web. 6 June 2014.
High Cost of Low Prices. Dir. Robert Greenwald. 2005. DVD. Web.
Lessing, Doris. “No Witchcraft for Sale.” Prentice-Hall Literature. Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes: The British Tradition. Grade 12. Ed. Kinsella, Kate. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2002. 1116 -1122. Print.
Polk, Sam "For the Love of Money." The New York Times 18 Jan. 2014