David's Story

I now think that humans can be of the same species and have completely different sets of moral values. We have seen many different authorities on the park’s history, and it seems that all of them disagree with someone else. The Lamberts think the park is a good thing, even though some terrible things happened to make it. The Perdues think that the government did a bad thing when making the park. I personally side with Carolyn Reeder, who believes that the park is good but should and could have been made in a better way.

However, I did not always agree with Carolyn Reeder’s views. After reading Grandpa’s Mountain and seeing The Iris Still Blooms at the beginning of ThinkQuest, I felt the way the Perdues feel - that the park was a bad thing for the government to do.

Before I started ThinkQuest, I never even knew that people had been displaced for the park. Now that I do, I won’t ever feel the same when I go to the park. Knowing that people lived there will make me feel haunted. But I don’t think that the park is bad. Like I said before, I think it could have been made in a better way but is still good to have.

I think that if just parts of the peoples land had been sold, the park could still have been built, and ended up just a little smaller. The park would be around your land, not part of it. That way, the park would be built but the people could live out their days on their land.
From now on, I will want to know if a government project will possibly displace people before supporting it. If it does displace people, I will try to put in my ideas about displacement. I will be wary of people planning something new in populated areas.

It would be interesting to see how someone reacts to Hollow Folk, a biased, hillbilly- image-creating book, if they had not seen some of the resources we have seen before reading it.

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