Walker "Am I Blue?" Comment

I believe Walker’s main point is that animal’s have feelings too and should have rights, just like us, but we seem to forget that as we get older. She uses a lot of good analogies in her essay “Am I Blue?” because she’s comparing feelings of different people, like the African-American’s and Indians, with animal’s feelings. She uses human examples of communication and feelings to help make people understand that animals have feelings and right’s just like were given to African American’s and Indian’s. When she talks about non English speaking women I believe her analogy meaning is that the men were happier when the women couldn’t speak, just like animals, and once they could they became unhappy because now they couldn’t think of only themselves (seeing their own reflection in the women’s eyes rather than her feelings) since they could now voice their feelings. Sometimes the way she words it can be misleading and could easily be taken in different ways from which she means; mostly because people are too quick to read it fast and respond versus taking a few minutes to think about, compare, and analyze what they just read.

I loved her ending! I see how people could take it as her pushing vegetarianism on people but I believe it was more of a metaphor of Blue’s mistreatment. I think she was pointing out that we see the images we want to see so we don’t feel bad; cows are “contented”, hens are “happy”, and so forth on farms because the friend that came to visit said Blue (white horse) was the very image of freedom yet he was miserable. Therefore when she says she was eating misery I think she was referring to how the animals are possibly raised and feel, like Blue.

From this essay I learned some vocabulary words like euphemism and benign. I also learned a broader way of using analogies. I use analogies a lot when trying to explain something to someone I can’t seem to find the right words for because it tends to help them understand. Now I can use analogies that