Reflection on Gathering Blue

Critical Thinking Question: Who has “power” in your text? How does that power get shown?

Power is the ability to do what you want and to be in control, and not just of yourself, but of other people too. Some people know how to use that power to control people to do good things, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., and they do this by gaining people’s trust. But some people use power for bad reasons and in the wrong way, and it’s up to other people to realize that, and take that power away from them. In the book Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry, the Council of Guardians is a group of people who basically run the society that the main character Kira lives in. They gain people’s trust, but they wield this massive amount of power with bad intentions. Kira has a special gift at sewing and using dyes, and because of that Kira receives a special job from the Council. When Kira starts this job, she meets Thomas and Jo, other orphaned kids who have been given different special tasks, and together they find out how terrible the Council of Guardians really is. The Council uses its power to control the society and its people in order to keep society stable and not have any major challenges. But when the people who have a lot of power take their power too far, it can make other people rebel, which is what happens with Kira and her friends. Power can be a very useful thing, but can also be a double-edged sword. Good people use power to build things and make commands from good intentions. Bad people use power to lie, corrupt, and deceive people, and use that power to gain what they want or to prevent what they don’t want. However, no matter how hard one tries and how much power one has, you cannot change what people think, only what they can do.

Because the Council of Guardians has the most power in the society, they think they can choose who is suitable and not suitable for living. They choose to kill people because they can benefit from their death, they can do better without those people, and/or just to make sure that the Council maintains power. For example, the Council thinks that crippled people are less helpful than non-crippled people in the society, so sometimes the Council decides to put them in the Field, a place where people are left to die. Because Kira’s leg is twisted, it makes it harder for her to walk and do basic things, and once her mother (the woman who protected her from being thrown into the Field) died, people started talking to her about how she should be left in the Field to die too: “You don’t belong in the village anymore. You’re worthless, with that leg. Your mother always protected you but she’s gone now. You should go too.” (Lowry 18) In this community, it seems that health is an important part of being able to survive the Council, but it also seems that you need to do a whole lot more to be able to please them also. The Council also kills people if it helps benefit them. For example, the Council kills the three kids’ (Kira, Thomas, and Jo) parents because the kids have special gifts. The Council wants to harness these gifts for their own use, and to do that they have to kill the parents and make it seem like an accidental death. Kira had thought that both her parents’ deaths had been an accident, but it wasn’t until she learned more about the Council and what they were really doing that she started to question it:

Her mother’s death: a sudden violent, isolated illness. Such things were rare. Usually illness struck the village and many were taken. Perhaps her mother had been poisoned… Because they wanted Kira… So that they could capture her gift: her skill with the threads. And Thomas? His parents too? And Jo’s?... So that all their gifts would be captive. (Lowry 235)

The Council did a lot of horrible things just so that they could get what they wanted, and this was all because they had so much power and thought they could do anything and still be in control. However, the more bad things they did, the more the curious kids like Kira tried found out about what the Council of Guardians’ real intentions were.

In Gathering Blue, the Council of Guardians also think that they can choose who gets what, and what information people get to know about, and what they can keep from them. One example is that the Council of Guardians is lying to people about huge terrifying beasts in the wild to make them want to stay in the society and not explore elsewhere, where they most likely would find a place better than the society that they are currently living in. People believe them too, including Kira, because who else’s word does she have to compare it to? One time, in fact, Kira is talking to her teacher Annabella about how she was followed by a beast and hears some interesting news:

’A beast followed me on the path’ Kira said trying to breathe normally… ‘Maybe Matt would let me bring Branch each day. Even a little dog might scare the beasts back.’ Annabella laughed. ‘There be no beasts,’ she said. (Lowry 120)

This surprises Kira and makes her think more about if there really are huge beasts, and she starts to realize how there really aren’t and that the Council lied to keep them fenced into this community. The Council also hides innovation and resources from people, like indoor bathrooms and mattresses and other things that you would never find in the rest of the society.  When Kira first comes to her new house in the “town hall”, she is shocked by what she discovers in her room:

She was astonished. The cott where she had lived all of her life with her mother had been a simple dirt-floored hut… This room had several tables, skillfully made, carved and delicate. And the bed was wood, on legs, covered with lightly woven bed coverings… She caught a glimpse of what at first seemed flat stones; it was a floor of pale green tile. ‘There is water here,’ he explained, ‘for washing and all your needs.’ Water? Inside a building? (Lowry 69)

It’s amazing how the human race always finds ways to improve life in some way, yet in this society it seems that they are moving at a much slower pace. The Council isn’t showing them amazing things like indoor bathrooms, and mirrors, and raised beds because they think if the people find ways to improve their lives so much, they will also want to improve their government.  The Council wants to prevent their people from learning how amazing the world could be without the Council of Guardians, which would end up taking the Council’s power away.

No matter how hard the Council tries to control all the power, they are never able to completely control what people think. While some people are unaware of what the Council is doing, others like Kira are curious, and because of that they start to find stuff out that the Council wants to be kept a secret. Kira soon realizes that all of the kids’ parents died, and “coincidentally” they all had gifts which the Council knew about. Kira learns that the Singer, the man who sang the daylong song about their history, was chained up and being held captive as a prisoner, and she worries that that would be her future too. Finally, she puts it all together when she meets a man who had escaped from the Field and is now living with people from a nearby community, and who is in fact her supposedly dead father. He explains how his new community is mainly made up of crippled people like himself (he was blind) who were so rudely tossed out by the Council. He also explains how a beast had not killed him, but it was in fact a man who had injured him. She then realizes that the Council did all these terrible things just so that they could try to keep their power, but Kira has found out. From her many more will learn what the Council has done and they will lose their power because people will know all these terrible and questionable things, and will want them to overthrow the Council. The Council’s goal of isolating the crippled people would be lost because Kira wants to make sure that her society and her father’s new one will eventually meet: “’One day our villages will know each other,’ Kira assured him. ‘I can feel that already.’ It was true.” (Lowry 240) The Council tries to use more power then they have, and they alienates the people and costs them the people’s trust, which in turn makes them lose power. The people should be able to explore new areas without the terrible Council and its deception. No one group can ever have too much power, because then they start to make decisions for other people that takes away basic human rights.

No matter where you are, there will always be someone who has power. The Council has the power when the story starts, but the people who know what’s going on and what the Council is keeping from them are the people who have the real power. No matter how hard the Council tries, they can never have power over what people think, and because of this, they try to imprison the people like Kira, Thomas, and Jo, in attempts to control as much as possible. In the story, the society has a tale of the past, and how it kept getting destroyed and they had to rebuild. Eventually they will have to rebuild again, especially with that lousy government, but will anyone ever be able to achieve a perfect society with no killing or stealing or hunger or any of that, yet have the power be equally distributed between the people? Is that even possible, and what would happen when it was achieved? Will no one ever try to gain more power than everyone else? Power can cause both good and bad, depending on how you use it and what your intentions are. The good of heart will make and shape our society to something better, while the cold-hearted ones will only make decisions based on their own well-being. What do you think you would do with all that power? Hopefully not what the Council of Guardians did.