EXPLORATION 7 

The movement on the Highways:   

The movement on the highway's have given me a whole new outlook, now when I travel on the highway, I imagine lines and lines of people walking, camping and sleeping on them.  In the ditches lined with children and families who once had a bit of self worth. Who now are displaced and afraid. Living day to day with uncertainty.  I have to remember as it is so powerfully said in chapter 2o this is one of the two paragraph that has touched me.

      
'The MOVING, questing people migrants now. Those families which had lived on a little piece of land , who had lived and died on forty acres, had eaten and starved on the produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And they scampered about looking for work; and the highways were streams of people.'  Wow, how powerful and what a visual you get in this paragraph.  My reasoning for posting the photo of the children is this, these are children of the camps. They ended up from the highways to the camps but even here while there was running water, food the children still look so afraid, so unsure and wondering where they might have to move nest.  My reasoning for making the word 'had' bold was because it is so imperatively on getting the point across of what the Joads and the other people had once. Now they are left to living in ditches on the highways, being hungry, dirty, afraid. Treated as though they were not 'human' in many cases.  Always referred to as 'The Goddamn Okies'.  A statement like that to me makes you become of a non-human person.

Migrant family from Idabel on the road to
Calfornia

Migrant family from Muskogee, Oklahoma

For these photos above  show the movement on the highway's and my second paragraph that was so powerful to explain and give us a real feel, of how they lived is this: ''And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they scampered on the highways.  The movement changed them; the highways, the camps, along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them.  The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them--hostility that made little towns group and arm as though to repeal and invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and store keepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.'

Will We Eat Today?

The word 'changed' them jumped out to me. The writer was wanting to see, to know to feel the way those poor people felt.  This has happened to people we love and know today.  I have asked many times when  was I young to my grandparents about how they lived and what the Great Depression was like and they shared these same stories. When your so hungry, your children hungry and sick you will do what it takes to get food.  Sometimes that meant people dying or getting hurt. It is known as survival.  Families than were so much more united as they grew up. Some families were destroyed yes, but through a tragedy such as this you grow and you remember where you came from and what you had once lost and that was for many  of 'Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had eaten and starved on produce of forty acres.'