Consider the following comments on loyalty.
Loyalty is easy until it asks us to stand where we would rather not be seen.
Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We learn what our loyalties are worth only when they cost us something.
Sometimes staying loyal to a person means betraying who they have become.
The loyalty that cannot question is not devotion but fear in a softer word.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that loyalty is among the most admired and most dangerous of attachments, because the same steadfastness that makes us trustworthy can also bind us to people and causes we have outgrown. Open with a remembered test, a friend defended at a cost, or a silence kept to protect someone who perhaps did not deserve it. Then work the tension: loyalty that bends to every doubt is worthless, yet loyalty that refuses all doubt becomes complicity. A useful structural move distinguishes loyalty to a person from loyalty to who that person was, since people change and our devotion does not always notice. Caution: avoid the clean verdict that loyalty is simply a virtue, since history and our own lives are full of harm done faithfully, by people who were only being loyal.