America's choice: Huck or Tom

I believe many of us, if not all, are living in the United States of Tom and Huck. We live in the United State of Tom, because, like Tom, we abide by the the rules of society that we were born into. There are rules and stereotypes presented in society that we take for granted, because we have all grown up around them and live with them in our daily lives.

For example, not so long ago, gay marriages could not be performed in the country, and announcing such was considered wrong. Although many did not personally have anything against gay marriage, they had grown up around the culture which did not accept gays, and thus did nothing to try to promote change. However, one by one more began to see the issue from Huck's point of view, and began to try to change the laws against gay marriage.

This relates The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Around the end of the book, Tom and Huck had just freed Jim, a runaway slave, after performing an elaborate plan to bust him out of captivity. After the plan however, the reader finds out that Tom had known the whole time that Jim was now a free slave, however decided to go with the plan out of his own amusement. This not only shows a darker side of Tom, but shows that he barely thinks of the slaves any more then how slaveholders thought at the time. Because Tom in known to be the more civilized boy of the two, he was simply raised to believe what the society lived around him believed. Huck however was not civilized in the slightest, and grew up on the edges of society, and therefore was able to see past the racial views of America during that time, and find humanity in Jim.

I do however believe that we also live in the United State of Huck. Every now and then, we are able to look past the beliefs we were raised with, and find something that is need of fixing. When this happens, and those people form a group, change happens, and we start to also live in the United States of Huck. Hopefully, we will start to turn more into a Huck society, and begin to stray from our tendency to blindly follow tradition.