The virus that is prejudice has an appallingly high rate of infection. Its contagious property allows this virus to spread among the masses at alarming speeds. Its fuel is the ignorant, those who lack tolerance, and the people that display no understanding towards others nor attempt to. Prejudice is unlike other viruses, it will not make you sick in the traditional sense; but instead radically impairs your vision. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, and in a report given shortly before the recent war in Iraq began citing French indecisiveness and power envy, the victims of prejudice know the iniquity it can cause, for they were at the receiving end.
             The victims of prejudice found that ignorance was a driving force that fed a cruel new behavior the previously kind people of Maycomb adopted. The townspeople found themselves torn between two ultimatums, black or white, Tom Robinson or Bob Ewell. The evidence pointed to the latter's guilt. Tom was not capable of raping a woman with once arm let alone inflicting wounds on her face with his left arm, which doesn't exist in the first place. Yet there was an unforeseen factor in this fateful trial that even the strongest evidence became negligible. Atticus was sadly mistaken in saying, "Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal," page 205. Tom Robinson was not treated as an equal; he was black and therefore guilty as charged. This is exactly what the jury saw, and likewise was reflected on to their verdict, guilty. The blackness and ignorance in men's hearts had ruined a black man's life.
             The blackness and ignorance in men's hearts is not limited by age or gender. The cruelty of children reveals their true lack of understanding towards others. Dill, Jem, and Scout would find themselves with sole one purpose every su
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