All the Right Stuff by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

Good Book, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “But that doesn’t stop me from not knowing whether you’re going to follow the social contract or not. Because it seems to me like you’re looking around to see what everybody else is doing first, and then making up your mind as things go along.”
    â€œYou have to do that,” I said. “Don’t you have a right to protect yourself?”
    â€œA fundamental, inalienable right, sir,” Elijah said. “You certainly have a right to protect yourself and what belongs to you. But what you’re telling me is that if everybody in the tribe doesn’t follow the contract, then there can’t be a contract, and that bothers me. It bothers me because there’s always somebody who wants to walk their own way, or who looks at the contract and says, ‘Hey, I can get an advantage out of this situation.’”
    â€œOkay, so I know this guy who was telling me that all the social contract does is to make little people like me scared to step out of line so the people in charge can do whatever they want to do,” I said. “And he studied the social contract in college.”
    â€œSo he should know something about it,” Elijah said.
    â€œHe does know something about it,” I said. “I was thinking about what he said and what you said and it’s almost the same thing, but he looks at it differently than you do. You said we were giving up our right to do anything we wanted, and Sly said the same thing, except he was saying that the people on top never have to give up their rights, just the people on the bottom.”
    â€œHobbes,” Elijah said. “A lot of people study Hobbes, but they don’t really understand him.”
    â€œI’m talking about Sly,” I said. “He’s a big dude, wears those little glasses.”
    â€œI’m talking about Thomas Hobbes,” Elijah said. “He was one of the first men to talk about the social contract. You can look him up on the internet.”
    â€œYou use the internet?”
    â€œMr. DuPree, I am a black man with gray hair, a touch of arthritis, and a thirst for knowledge. I am not a dinosaur!”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œAnd this fellow you’re talking about is right. Hobbes was trying to make sense of how people can live together successfully, but he thought that most people couldn’t make their own decisions. In his version of the social contract, the people on top of the heap had to decide the best way for society to live. If you let people make their own decisions, life would end up being poor, nasty, and short.”
    â€œThat’s what Sly said!”
    â€œWhen you say Sly, are you referring to Mr. Edward Norton? Young man who drives around in a fancy car and has a bodyguard?” Elijah asked.
    â€œHe said he used to talk to you,” I answered. “You know him?”
    â€œI know his family and yes, I used to talk to him at times,” Elijah said. “His father was a preacher, and so was his grandfather. Edward, or Sly, as he likes to be called, was always a bright young man. But one morning he got up and looked in the mirror and saw himself in a new light. He saw the same thing that a lot of other people, including Hobbes, saw—that maybe the social contract was good for most people, but the people on top didn’t really have to worry about the people on the bottom.”
    â€œAnd Sly sees himself as one of the people on the top?”
    â€œThat he does, Mr. DuPree. That he does. But Edward is a young man who thinks, and that’s good.”
    â€œSo does this all end up with somebody being right and somebody being wrong?” I asked.
    â€œIt ends up with people looking at the same picture and seeing different things,” Elijah said. “A man named John Rawls said that the only way that the social contract could work perfectly was if everybody goes into it blind. And our friend